Re: capitalism = progressive?
Ted Winslow wrote: As I've said before, I think this view of the development of rational self-consciousness is mistaken. In general, I think Marx underestimates the tenaciousness of irrationality and misunderstands its roots in social relations. Misogynist patriarchalism, for instance, tends to reproduce itself through its effect on infant and child development. * I agree, Ted, especially about the reproduction of patriarchy through childhood indoctrination and the all round educational development and nurturing which goes along with the socialization of children. Obviously, Marx was not privy to anthropological and psychological insights and analysis of subconscious determinates which were developed after he died e.g. Fromm's work in the early 30s on the development of authoritarian character structure. He was as much a prisoner of his own history as we are. My personal view is that the instinct to be free is submerged under layers of learned ideological rationalization which, in general, condition us to accept our places in the hierarchies of political power, as long as these power structures remain stable. This is why most humans are and remain conservative even in the most absurd of political-economic circumstances. When these layers are disrupted by some sort of crisis which threatens humans in these societies existentially--wars, depressions and the like-- and are subsequently de-legitimized in time, the instinct to be free can and often does combine with newly unfolding reasons, ways and means to survive and so to speak, break on through to the other side. I see these eruptions as having occured during the Paris Commune, the Russian Revolution and its emerging workers' councils, the Spanish Civil War and to a lesser extent within other brief moments in time e.g. Paris in '68. I think that history shows us that class conscious praxis did not spread far and deep enough to make the social revolution a reality for more than brief moments during these times. However, in my opinion, it would be irrational to believe that such existential crises will not occur in the future. And on a world scale, I think the human race has made some progress on the rational level out of superstition. It's not all the way there yet, by any means. Therefore, the revolutionary consciousness and the dictatorship of the proletariat which Marx saw and reported on in his Civil War in France will most likely happen again.Like Marx, I wouldn't venture to predict when that will be. However, as this list attests, there are plenty of crises on the horizon, some of which could be just the spark needed. Perhaps, next time, we'll succeed. Best, Mike B) = Love and freedom are vital to the creation and upbringing of a child. Sylvia Pankhurst http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at Yahoo! HotJobs http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/careermakeover
Re: Bush, the lesser evil?
--- Chris Burford [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: - Original Message - From: Mike Ballard [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, April 26, 2004 9:54 AM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Bush, the lesser evil? Chris, Does this mean that you don't think it mattered whether FDR or one of his Republican opponents became President in the 30s and 40s? Cheers, Mike B) I was mainly making the point that the small manoeuvres between bourgeois, imperialist, candidates are trivial as a lesser evil argument. I did however point out that other aspects of the NYT editorial suggested to me, a strategy to put the skids under Bush's unilateralist war of aggression against Iraq, over a period of months, by studiously not using the word conscription, but bringing the argument up to that point. No I don't know about FDR. The truth is always concrete. But when I listen to some of Paul Robson's songs from that era it seems to me there was a scope for progressive politics that there was not at other times. I have a soft spot for Ken Livingstone, even though he makes alliances with the finance capitalism of the City of London for some of his more socially coherent initiatives. I cannot see from Google that Lenin ever advocated a lesser evil type argument for choosing one bourgeois party over another. He did famously in one concrete political formation call for support as a rope supports a hanging man. I do myself think there are sometimes arguments for supporting the election of one bourgeois party over another provided this is not done in such a way as to promote any faith or illusion in the bourgeois party, but for reasons that actually shift the balance of power in some way towards working people. A far more difficult concrete situation was at the time of the rise of Nazism when in retrospect perhaps all progressives got it wrong. Google brings up the following argument by Trotsky in FOR A WORKERS' UNITED FRONT AGAINST FASCISM by Leon Trotsky Written in exile in Turkey, December 8 1931 IS BRUENING THE LESSER EVIL? The Social Democracy supports Bruening, votes for him, assumes responsibility for him before the masses-on the grounds that the Bruening government is the lesser evil. Die Rote Fahne attempts to ascribe the same view to me-on the grounds that I expressed myself against the stupid and shameful participation of the Communists in the Hitler referendum. But have the German Left Opposition and myself in particular demanded that the Communists vote for and support Bruening? We Marxists regard Bruening and Hitler, Braun included, as component parts of one and the same system. The question as to which one of them is the lesser evil has no sense, for the system we are fighting against needs all these elements. But these elements are momentarily involved in conflicts with one another and the party of the proletariat must take advantage of these conflicts in the interest of the revolution. In my opinion the difference between Kerry and Bush is not of this magnitude. It is a policy difference not a class difference. They are both imperialists and both hegemonic imperialists. But Bush's policy has been to use the massive preponderance of US military might unilaterally to impose its hegemony. Kerry would obviously use this, but appears by his background, his utterances, and his position on Iraq to favour a more multi-lateralist hegemonic position. This may matter more outside the US than within it. Even outside it is a matter of judgement whether the advantages outweigh the disadvantages for the progressive forces of the world versus international finance capital headed by US capital, to have Empire consolidated under the more complex hegemonic leadership of a Kerry type figure rather than fragmented and dramatised by a Bush type figure. Chris Burford *88 I don't really disagree with the main thrust of what you're putting out there, Chris. The way I see it, the vulture, called Capital, has two wings. I prefer the left-wing of wage-slavery to the right. Both are going to beat me down. I realize that. Until the class conscious workers have the organizational power to clip these wings, I'd prefer the left one, rather than the right one flapping over my head. BTW, I'm usually quite amused at Livingston's tweaks to Blair's and the other ruling polystricksters' noses. Regards, Mike B) P.S. I hate social conservatives. = Love and freedom are vital to the creation and upbringing of a child. Sylvia Pankhurst http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at Yahoo! HotJobs http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/careermakeover
In case you needed confirmation: wages and sick time.......
The working class is being pushed down. It's the relentless pressure of the class struggle being depicted here. Meanwhile, why not call in sick on Friday, April 30 and make this May Day weekend one long holiday. For One Big Union, Mike B) BUREAU OF LABOR STATISTICS, DAILY REPORT, FRIDAY, APRIL 23, 2004: The 34 million workers who earn less than $8.70 per hour are falling behind in their standard of living because of myopic business cost-cutting, government deregulation, and technological changes, according to the authors of: Low-Wage America: How Employers are Reshaping Opportunity in the Workplace by Eileen Appelbaum, a professor and director of the Center for Women and Work at Rutgers University, and others. Funded by the Russell Save and Rockefeller Foundations and published in December 2003, the study surveyed some 10,000 workers and managers in 25 predominantly low-wage industries, and dozens of case studies of companies and industries were developed. Structural changes in the U.S. economy have increased the pressures faced by employers, and their responses have worsened labor market outcomes for high school educated workers, the study said. These changes are so profound that even the extremely tight 1990s labor markets, which resulted in the lowest unemployment rates in 30 years, did not allow the real earnings of male high school graduates to return to their 1970 levels. Of the 277,000 workers that the Department of Labor reported were added to private payrolls in March, two-thirds were in low wage industries, such as retail trade, food and drink establishments, janitorial services, home health nursing, repair, and maintenance, Appelbaum said. The study found that many of the cost-cutting strategies used by employers have disproportionately affected low-wage workers. Rather than innovate their services, improve quality, and train and empower workers, many have cut costs by freezing or lowering wages, reducing benefits, increasing workloads, subcontracting, using temporary workers, automating and moving or outsourcing low-skill jobs to low-wage areas here and in other countries, it said. The real value of the minimum wage has decreased to 40 percent below its 1968 level, the study said. If the minimum wage had kept pace with inflation, it would be $8.46 today instead of $5.15. The problem is expected to persist. Of the 10 occupations that the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates will have the greatest job growth between now and 2012, seven pay below-average wages (under $41,820 per year), including five that pay very low wages, Appelbaum said (Daily Labor Report, page A-11, http://www.russellsage.org/programs/proj_reviews/future American workers should stop trying to be heroes and just stay home when they're sick -- it could be cheaper for their employers, according to Cornell University labor researchers. Workers who come in sick cost their employers an average of $255 each per year, they say. Sick employees have difficulty concentrating, work more slowly and have to repeat tasks, bogging down productivity, according to the study (They also get their co-workers sick, but those costs were not counted in the study). Economists refer to slack productivity from ailing workers as presenteeism, and the Cornell study said it may cost employers even more than absenteeism due to illness. Other studies have suggested that presenteeism costs U.S. businesses $180 billion annually in lost productivity. The study doesn't mean people should stay home sick at every sniffle, says Ron Goetzel, director of Cornell's Institute for Health and Productivity Studies in Washington, which conducted the research. It says this is a very large category of expenses, even exceeding the costs of absenteeism and medical and disability benefits, and part of the problem is that employers have not yet fully recognized the financial impact it can have on their business (William Kates, Associated Press, http://www.newsday.com/business/sns-ap-calling-in-sick,0,2752668.story?c ol = Love and freedom are vital to the creation and upbringing of a child. Sylvia Pankhurst http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at Yahoo! HotJobs http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/careermakeover
Re: Bush, the lesser evil?
Chris, Does this mean that you don't think it mattered whether FDR or one of his Republican opponents became President in the 30s and 40s? Cheers, Mike B) --- Chris Burford [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Louis Proyect effectively demonstrates how the concept of the lesser evil becomes nonsense, even on the most pragmatic opportunist tactical level, as two bourgeois candidates for President, and their supporters, circle round each other, trying to avoid giving the other side opportunity for attack. = Love and freedom are vital to the creation and upbringing of a child. Sylvia Pankhurst http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Photos: High-quality 4x6 digital prints for 25¢ http://photos.yahoo.com/ph/print_splash
Re: capitalism = progressive?
--- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: BTW, here's another addition to the list of why the old USSR fell: Chernoble. JD * I think it was the straw which broke the camel's back. I was in Berlin when the plant blew up on April 26, 1986. I went to East Berlin for the May Day parade. It was strange-- giant photos of Ernst Thaelmann and in the pages of Neues Deutschland a small article about taking iodine tablets. I think you can sense the generalized cynicism about censorship, lies and resistance to herding by the CP in this woman's motorcycle tour of the area around Chernobyl: http://www.angelfire.com/extreme4/kiddofspeed/ Best, Mike B) = Love and freedom are vital to the creation and upbringing of a child. Sylvia Pankhurst http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Photos: High-quality 4x6 digital prints for 25¢ http://photos.yahoo.com/ph/print_splash
Re: re Paris Commune: (Was Re: capitalism = progressive?)
Hi Hari, Marx and Engels supported the Paris Commune. The work I cited in my post gives ample evidence of this. For others, here is the relevant web site on what became known as Marx's Civil War in France: http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ Marx wrote that if you want to see an example of the dictatorship of the proletariat in action, look to the Paris Commune. All the best, Mike B) --- Hari Kumar [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Mike Ballard: I agree with most of your observations and I'm not trying to play one-upsmanship here; but Marx and many others thought that the French--espeically the workers of Paris--had reached at least a level of class consciousness sufficient to begin to junk the old State machinery and to attempt to create a class dictatorship of their own: the Paris Commune of 1871. Of course, France was awash with a peasant class as was the Czarist Empire of 1917. While this is right, htat M did caution that it was inopportune - I think the overall message that M E did not support the Commune should not be left potentially haning in the air. If the masses moved, righlty or wronglY - M supported it. That is my interpretation anyway. Hari = Love and freedom are vital to the creation and upbringing of a child. Sylvia Pankhurst http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Photos: High-quality 4x6 digital prints for 25¢ http://photos.yahoo.com/ph/print_splash
Re: capitalism = progressive?
Ultimately, the USSR stepped in the direction of capitalism and I'd contend that it was because Marxist-Leninist ruling parties have a tendency to use wage-labour and commodity prodution as a transitional measures. Mike B) --- Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The USSR was not socialist as we would like to see socialism. It was a first step in that direction. You probably remember as well as anyway here that Marx said that the first stage would be crude. On Thu, Apr 22, 2004 at 04:17:48PM -0400, Ted Winslow wrote: Michael Perelman wrote: the Soviet Union had the advantage of (a relatively crude) socialist organization of production. Was it socialist in a sense derivable from Marx? -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu = Love and freedom are vital to the creation and upbringing of a child. Sylvia Pankhurst http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Photos: High-quality 4x6 digital prints for 25¢ http://photos.yahoo.com/ph/print_splash
Re: Got this from Deborah
the Gospel of Debbie THE GOSPEL OF DEBBIE by PAUL RUDNICK Recent works like The Passion of the Christ and The Da Vinci Code seek to illuminate the life of Jesus. Not long ago, an additional text was discovered in an ancient linen backpack found in a cave outside Jerusalem, surrounded by what appeared to be early Roman candy wrappers and covered with stickers reading I [heart] All Faiths and Ask Me About Hell. A parchment diary found inside the backpack appears to contain the musings of one Debbie of Galilee. Many of the pages are still being translated from high-school Aramaic; here are some persuasive excerpts. October 5 I saw him in the marketplace! Everyone says that he's the son of God, but I don't care one way or the other because he's just so cute!!! O.K., he's not hot like a gladiator or a centurion, but he's really sensitive and you can tell that he thinks about things and then goes, Be nice to people, and I'm like, that is so true, and I wonder if he's seeing anyone! October 21 Everyone says that he's just totally good and devoted to all humanity and that he was sent to save us and that's why he doesn't have time for a girlfriend, although I swear I saw Mary Magdalene doodling in the sand with a stick, writing Mrs. Jesus Christ and Merry Xmas from Mary and Jesus Christ and All the Apostles, with little holly leaves all around it. And I'm like, Mary, are you dating Jesus? and she says, no, he's just helping me, and I'm like, you mean with math? and she's like, no, to not be such a whore. And I said, but that is so incredibly sweet, and we both screamed and talked about whether we like him better when he's healing the lame or with a ponytail. December 25 I wanted to get him the perfect thing for his birthday, so I asked Matthew and he said, well, myrrh is good, but then Luke said, oh please, everyone always gives him myrrh, I bet he wishes those wise men had brought scented candles, some imported marmalade, and a nice box of notecards. So I go, O.K., what about accessories, like a new rope belt or clogs or like I could make him a necklace with his name spelled out in little clay letters? and Mark said, I love that, but Luke rolled his eyes and said, Mark, you are just such an Assyrian. So I go to see Mary, Jesus' mom, and she said that Jesus doesn't need gifts, that he just wants all of us to love God and be better people, but I asked, what about a sweater? and she said medium. January 2 Oh my God, oh my God, I couldn't believe it, but I was right there, and Jesus used only five loaves of bread and two fish to feed thousands of people, and it was so beautiful and miraculous, and my brother Ezekiel said, whoa, Jesus has invented canapes and I said shut up! And then my best friend Rachel asked, I wonder if he could make my hair really shiny, and I said, you are so disgusting, Jesus shouldn't waste his time on your vanity, and then Jesus smiled at me and I'm telling you, those last seven pounds, the stubborn ones, they were totally gone! And I spoke unto the angry Roman mob and I said, behold these thighs! Jesus has made me feel better about me! March 12 Everyone is just getting so mean. They're all going, Debbie, he is so not divine, Debbie, you'll believe anything, Debbie, what about last year when you were worshipping ponchos? And I so don't trust that Judas Iscariot, who's always staring at me when I walk to the well and he's saying, hey, Deb, nice jugs, and I'm like, oh ha ha ha, get some oxen. April 5 So Mary Magdalene tells me that Jesus and all the apostles had this big party and that it got really intense and Jesus drank from this golden goblet and now it's missing and the restaurant is like, this is why there's a surcharge. April 23 It's all over. And it's been terrible and amazing and I don't know what any of it means or who's right and who's wrong but maybe I'll figure it out later. Anyway, I'll always remember what Jesus said to me. He said, Debbie, I can foresee that someday you'll meet someone, someone wonderful, but for right now let's at least think about college. = On stopping terrorism: What the world needs are not armies of soldiers sowing death and destruction, but armies of physicians, teachers and engineers bringing health, education, progress and well-being...this is the only option. -Cuban diplomat Jorge Ferrer Rodriguez speaking at the U.N. Commission on Human Rights. 3/23/04 __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Photos: High-quality 4x6 digital prints for 25¢ http://photos.yahoo.com/ph/print_splash
Re: capitalism = progressive?
--- Ted Winslow [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: My initial point was that there is an internal relation between self-consciousness, social relations and state power. This relation is such that where the requisite self-consciousness can't develop within existing social relatons, social relations and state power can't become socialist in Marx's sense. They couldn't have done so, for instance, in mid-nineteenth century France. Moreover, their own essence is such that they can't be created for individuals; they have to be created by them. Hi Ted, I agree with most of your observations and I'm not trying to play one-upsmanship here; but Marx and many others thought that the French--espeically the workers of Paris--had reached at least a level of class consciousness sufficient to begin to junk the old State machinery and to attempt to create a class dictatorship of their own: the Paris Commune of 1871. Of course, France was awash with a peasant class as was the Czarist Empire of 1917. In the case of Russia in 1917, there's some evidence that the dominant social relations produced a self-consciousness characterized by significant prejudice and superstition. Another book of Worobec's containing such evidence is _Possessed: Women, Witches and Demons in Imperial Russia_. If relations are internal, the social relations and state power that emerge in a given context (no matter what we choose to call them) will be internally related to the self-consciousness that dominates the context. The weight of reified, religious consciouness, of superstition and so on was undoubtedly high in Russia back in '17. Again, social relations was immersed in a sea of peasants. But other facts on the ground amongst the workers were also brewing. Women weavers of Ivanovo had created the first workers' council in 1905, two years after Lenin had proclaimed in What is To Be Done? that workers by themselves could not reach anything higher than trade-union consciousness. But then, this always sounded like one of Blanqui's obeservations. The Blanquists fared no better. Brought up in the school of conspiracy, and held together by the strict discipline which went with it, they started out from the viewpoint that a relatively small number of resolute, well-organized men would be able, at a given favorable moment, not only seize the helm of state, but also by energetic and relentless action, to keep power until they succeeded in drawing the mass of the people into the revolution and ranging them round the small band of leaders. this conception involved, above all, the strictest dictatorship and centralization of all power in the hands of the new revolutionary government. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/postscript.htm I think Marx's ontology is individualist in the sense that it allows only individuals to be the locus of agency and the realization of value. The importance of class derives from another ontological idea - internal relations. The nature of the individual - its essence - is the outcome of its relations. This is the way I would interpret Marx's claim about the human essence in the the sixth thesis on Feuerbach. The essence of the human individual is freedom defined, as Hegel defines it, as the potential for a will proper and a universal will. In Marx this is embodied in the idea of the universally developed individual, a kind of individual requiring for its full realization the relations that define the realm of freedom, an association in which the free development of each is the condition of the free development of all. Yes, the proles can't emancipate themselves from wage-slavery and the dictatorship of the capitalist class, without becoming themselves, as individuals conscious of who they are--the wealth producers of society--people who give up what they create to people who employ them for wages or salaries. As the bearded ones put it: All the preceding classes that got the upper hand sought to fortify their already acquired status by subjecting society at large to their conditions of appropriation. The proletarians cannot become masters of the productive forces of society, except by abolishing their own previous mode of appropriation, and thereby also every other previous mode of appropriation. They have nothing of their own to secure and to fortify; their mission is to destroy all previous securities for, and insurances of, individual property. All previous historical movements were movements of minorities, or in the interest of minorities. The proletarian movement is the self-conscious, independent movement of the immense majority, in the interest of the immense majority. The proletariat, the lowest stratum of our present society, cannot stir, cannot raise itself up, without the whole superincumbent strata of official society being sprung into the air. http://www.anu.edu.au/polsci/marx/classics/manifesto.html Then, you
Re: a chilling report
More iceing for the cake, Mike B) *** Whose Human Rights is the Occupation Defending by David Bacon; April 17, 2004 The disaster that is the occupation of Iraq is much more than the war that plays nightly across U.S. television screens. The violence of grinding poverty, exacerbated by economic sanctions after the first Gulf War, has been deepened by the US invasion. Every day the economic policies of the occupying authorities create more hunger among Iraq's working people, transforming them into a pool of low-wage, semi-employed labor, desperate for jobs at almost any price. While the effects of U.S. policy on daily life go largely unseen in the U.S. media, anyone walking the streets of Baghdad cannot miss them. Children sleep on the sidewalks. Buildings that once housed many of the city's four million residents, or the infrastructure that makes life in a modern city possible, remain burned-out ruins a year after the occupation started. Rubble fills the broad boulevards that were once the pride of a wealthy country, while the air turns gritty and brown as thousands of vehicles kick up the resulting dust. Sewage still pours into the Tigris River, and those who must depend on it for drinking or cooking continue to get sick. The violence of poverty is not held to be a violation of human rights in the United States - just one manifestation of the great division in the world between the wealthy, industrialized north, and the developing south. The US does not recognize that human rights include economic and social rights, in part because they are collective rights of groups, social classes, or even nations. Therefore, the accusations made by the US against the regime of Saddam Hussein focus on his violation of the human rights of individuals - the assassination of the regime's enemies, and the prohibition on political activity by individuals who dissented from its policies. Most popular organizations in Iraq, whether on the left or the right, religious or secular, make the same accusations. But they don't confine the discussion of human rights within those limits. For them, the occupation and the social conditions it imposes are human rights abuses as well. For the Bush administration and the Coalition Provisional Authority, limiting the discussion of human rights to those of individuals persecuted by the former regime provides a convenient distinction. It allows them to enforce in Iraq an economic model of their own choosing, with drastic effects on the lives of millions of people, and yet refuse to discuss these consequences as potential violations of their human rights. As a result of the occupation, U.S. contractors get rich from the billions of taxpayer dollars supposedly appropriated for Iraq's reconstruction. At the same time, the country's national wealth -- factories, refineries, mines, docks, and other industrial facilities -- are being readied for sale to foreign companies by the occupation bureaucracy, who treat democracy and the unrestrained free market as the same thing. Iraqis have lost control of their own economy and country. This is far more than a symbolic loss. Yet symbols are an important element in the way in which any people react to this basic economic reality, and nothing could have been more symbolic than the way in which the occupation authorities have treated the legacy of Iraq's nationalist, progressive and anti-colonial past. Since 1958, July 14 has been Iraq's national day. Last year, under the occupation, it was declared a Saddam-era holiday, and its celebration banned. Instead, occupation authorities declared, the people of Iraq should celebrate the day of the fall of the Saddam Hussein regime, which is also the day the occupation began. While most Iraqis were glad to see Saddam go, prohibiting the celebration of national day is not just an insult, but a sign of the occupation's true intentions. For progressive Iraqis, June 14 recalls their anti-colonial history. 1958 was the year nationalists and radicals threw out the monarchy imposed by the British after World War One. Over the next five years of relative freedom and democracy, Iraq began building a nationalized, planned economy, based on its oil wealth. Hundreds of factories were eventually built, making it the most industrialized country in the Middle East. The Iraqi government organized a national healthcare system, and treated education as a right. Women were represented in professions in percentages larger than any other Middle Eastern country. Even after that government was overthrown in 1963 (a coup in which the Central Intelligence Agency played an important role), those reforms were so popular that they were continued under the Baathist regime that took over. A new deepwater port was constructed on the Persian Gulf, Umm Qasr, which became a lynchpin in that plan. From its piers Iraq began to ship the
Re: What the hell is Kerry doing?
I think that he knows that the liberal left is afraid of another Bush Presidendcy, so much so that it will keep its collective mouth shut like good Germans. So, he only has to worry about appealing to the conservative middle to right as the left is all sewn up. Shane is right. It is a plutocracy. In fact, it has always been a dictatorship of the capitalist class. The more the left shuts up, the more blatant the more brazen the dictatorship becomes. Best, Mike B) --- Shane Mage [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Isn't it obvious? He knows, better than many Leftists, that the USA is an out-and-out plutocracy, not any sort of democracy. So he's making a direct and pointed appeal to the real electorate--guaranteeing that Imperial policy, now being impeded by the general stupidity, ignorance, and obscurantism of Ubu and his Bushits, will be pursued intelligently and competently by tested servants of Empire. Shane Mage When we read on a printed page the doctrine of Pythagoras that all things are made of numbers, it seems mystical, mystifying, even downright silly. When we read on a computer screen the doctrine of Pythagoras that all things are made of numbers, it seems self-evidently true. (N. Weiner) I am waiting for Kerry to do something right. Is the idiot trying to morph into Dukakis or is he trying to be indistinguishable from Bush? Does he think that he can win as a liberal Republican? I don't want to get into a lesser evil debate, just to find out if anybody has any idea what he is trying to accomplish. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu = Love and freedom are vital to the creation and upbringing of a child. Sylvia Pankhurst http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - File online by April 15th http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: $2,150 Per Family and Counting
--- Yoshie Furuhashi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: * April 16 / 18, 2004 $2,150 Per Family and Counting Paying for War * A lot of the surplus value we create and which the capitalist class appropriates is siphoned off via taxation to buy the State apparatus. Best, Mike B) = Love and freedom are vital to the creation and upbringing of a child. Sylvia Pankhurst http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Photos: High-quality 4x6 digital prints for 25¢ http://photos.yahoo.com/ph/print_splash
Re: Equality of Wages etc.
Even the equality of wages,which Proudhon demands, would merely transform the relation of the present-day worker to his work into the relation of all men to work. Society would then be conceived as an abstract capitalist. Wages are an immediate consequence of estranged labor, and estranged labor is the immediate cause of private property. If the one falls, then the other must fall too. http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx/Archive/1844-EPM/1st.htm#s1 I guess observations like the above, have always made me partial to notion of abolishing the wage system. Regards, Mike B) = Love and freedom are vital to the creation and upbringing of a child. Sylvia Pankhurst http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - File online by April 15th http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: $135 a pound
By Robert Scheer, AlterNet April 13, 2004 Why won't they just admit they blew it? It is long past time for the president and his national security team to concede that before the Sept. 11 attacks they failed to grasp the seriousness of the Al Qaeda threat, were negligent in how they handled the terrorist group's key benefactors and did not take the simple steps that might well have prevented the tragedy. While they are at it, they might also explain why, for more than two years, they have been trying so hard to convince us that none of the above is true. Most recently, we learned that President Bush decided to stay on vacation for three more weeks despite receiving a briefing that told him about patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks by Osama bin Laden's thugs, who were described as determined and capable enough to pull off devastating attacks on U.S. soil. We also now know that the Bush administration coddled fundamentalist Saudi Arabia and nuclear-weapons-dealing Pakistan, the only nations that recognized the Taliban, both before and after the Sept. 11 murders. But what is perhaps even more astonishing is that, because the Bush administration's attention was focused on the war on drugs, it praised Afghanistan's Taliban regime even though it was harboring Bin Laden and his terror camps. The Taliban refused to extradite the avowed terrorist even after he admitted responsibility for a series of deadly assaults against American diplomatic and military sites in Africa and the Middle East. On May 15, 2001, I blasted the Bush administration for rewarding the Taliban for controlling the opium crop with $43 million in U.S. aid to Afghanistan, to be distributed by an arm of the United Nations. Secretary of State Colin L. Powell announced the gift, specifically mentioning the opium suppression as the rationale and assuring that the U.S. would continue to look for ways to provide more assistance to the Afghans. Five months before 9/11, I publicly challenged the wisdom of supporting a regime that backed Al Qaeda: Never mind that Osama bin Laden still operates the leading anti-American terror operation from his base in Afghanistan, from which, among other crimes, he launched two bloody attacks on American embassies in Africa in 1998. I'm not clairvoyant, but I didn't need my own CIA to know that it's self-destructive to reward a regime that harbors the world's most dangerous terrorists. After 9/11, the column was dug up by bloggers and widely distributed and debated on the Internet. Defenders of the administration attacked it as a distortion, arguing that because the money was targeted as humanitarian aid, the U.S. was not actually helping the Taliban. Yet, this specious distinction ignored the context of Powell's glowing remarks, and it failed to explain a similarly toned follow-up meeting Aug. 2, 2001, in Islamabad, Pakistan, which gave the Taliban similar kid-glove treatment. That meeting, held between Christina B. Rocca, assistant secretary of State for South Asia, and Abdul Salam Zaeef, the Taliban ambassador to Pakistan, took place four days before Bush received his now-infamous briefing on the imminent threat from Al Qaeda agents who were already in sleeper cells in this country, armed with explosives. Yet, Rocca said nothing to the Taliban's ambassador about Al Qaeda's continuing threat to kill Americans, ignoring the fact that the Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders were at that point inseparable, financially, militarily and ideologically. In her defense, Rocca did ask the Taliban representative to extradite Bin Laden, for which she received nothing but bland disclaimers. We gave Rocca our complete assurance, Zaeef told the local media, that our soil will not be used against America, and that Afghan soil will not be used for any terrorist activity. Zaeef was also pleased that Rocca again congratulated the Taliban for its success in eradicating the opium crop, calling the meeting very successful and very cordial. And why should he not have been? As in May, the U.S. again was bringing not just words of encouragement but also a big cash prize. In recognition of the Taliban's elimination of opium, the raw material used to make heroin, the Bush administration is giving $1.5 million to the United Nations Drug Control Program to finance crop substitution, reported the Associated Press. Today, opium production in a tattered Afghanistan is at an all-time high, benefiting various warlords and a resurgent Taliban, while our money, troops and attention are focused on a quagmire in Iraq, a nation that had nothing to do with 9/11 and is not known for its opium. Go figure that out. Robert Scheer is the co-author of The Five Biggest Lies Bush Told Us About Iraq. = Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny and
Re: Equality of Wages etc.
An increase in wages arouses in the worker the same desire to get rich as in the capitalist, but he can only satisfy this desire by sacrificing his mind and body. An increase in wages presupposes, and brings about, the accumulation of capital, and thus opposes the product of labor to the worker as something increasingly alien* to him. Similarly, the division of labor makes him more and more one-sided and dependent, introducing competition from machines as well as from men. Since the worker has been reduced to a machine, the machine can confront him as a competitor. Finally, just as the accumulation of capital increases the quantity of industry and, therefore, the number of workers, so it enables the same quantity of industry to produce a greater quantity of products. This leads to overproduction and ends up either by putting a large number of workers out of work or by reducing their wages to a pittance. Marx in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844. http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx/Archive/1844-EPM/1st.htm#s1 * I think that the word alien can be confusing. What Marx is getting at primarily is alienation in the sense of the separation of ownership and control of the social product of labour which the wage-slave suffers. Wages CAN grow, but the product of labour, which is always greater, cannot be controlled nor owned by the producer, the worker, except by using the money gotten from her/his wages to buy a portion of it back in the form of commodities. Thus, the social product of labour in a wages system becomes an alien political-economic power OVER him/her. In a word, it becomes Capital. BTW, the equality of wages was something being planned and implemented in the old USSR. For example, wages on collective farms were being raised by greater percentages than wages in the more urbanized, more intellectual sectors in the sixties and seventies. Regards, Mike B) = Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do). Stephen Jay Gould http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - File online by April 15th http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: Equality of Wages etc.
There was a long article on wage equalization in a publication which was used by scholars in the West. I think it was called, Problems of Communism. I think the article came out in the seventies. I read it around 1981. If I find the reference, I'll pass it along. Anyway, lots of talk on this subject can be found by Googling around, including stuff embedded in the one below. Regards, Mike B) http://home.flash.net/~comvoice/29cAzad.html --- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: MB wrote: BTW, the equality of wages was something being planned and implemented in the old USSR. For example, wages on collective farms were being raised by greater percentages than wages in the more urbanized, more intellectual sectors in the sixties and seventies. I'm not an expert on the old USSR, but I understand that this was an effort to stop rural/urban migration. Earlier, under Stalin, the wage structure was made much more unequal. Jim D. = Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do). Stephen Jay Gould http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - File online by April 15th http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: US has lost militarily
Stop the Genocide against the People of Falluja City in Iraq The American military troops have proven unprecedented cruelty and barbarism throughout a whole week of aerial bombing on the residences of Falluja city in Mid-western Iraq. This followed a terrorist act administered by some local youth over four American contracters that ended in killing them and dismembering their bodies. The continuous American bombing has killed around 600 Falluja residents with brutality equivalent to that of the Baath regime and the former dictator Saddam Husein. The masters of Democracy and Human Rights have administered one of the bloodiest mass punishment over the civilians of Falluja City with cruelty unprecedented in modern history. As a result, the torn and shredded dead bodies of children and women filled the streets of the city. A sight to which the eyes of Paul Bremer and his generals, the professional mass-killers, did not even blink. Moreover, the Arab Nationalists and figures of Political Islam in Falluja city have proven to be leaders of the most inhuman terrorism in Iraq, with indifference to human lives, even if those belonged to their families, their women or children. One week ago, Falluja city was doomed with a criminal mob that found it quite easy to kill and burn bodies. After dragging dead bodies and dismembering them, they celebrated hanging them with brutality that will smear the humane conscience of millions of Iraqis for decades to come. In these days, these fanatics of Arab Nationalism and Islamism have managed by their determination to fight the American enemy to turn their homes into graveyards. In their neighbouhoods, they agitate battles with their long-waited American enemy, even if these happens at the expense of the lives of hundreds of their women and children. From all freedom lovers, people in Iraq need a stance of solidarity against one of the bloodiest genocides that was fully expected from the masters of Hiroshima and Nagazaki. Stand up against both poles of terrorism that have decided the verdict of death and destruction over the civilians of Falluja city. Down with the two poles of terrorism and their wars against innocent civilians. Lets all work to drive both poles of terrorism out of Iraq. There will be no salvation for the agonized humanity and no guaranty to civilians right to life with the existence of the professionals of genocide and terrorism. Yanar Mohammed Organisation Of Womens Freedom in Iraq OWFI April 11, 2004 http://www.wpiraq.org/english/ = Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do). Stephen Jay Gould http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - File online by April 15th http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: Will more violence provoke an extension of the US occupation?
--- Yoshie Furuhashi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At 10:29 PM -0500 4/10/04, dmschanoes wrote: the fighters in the streets demanding the withdrawal of US forces It is understandable that secular Communists are weary of fighters inspired by their religious faith, as the latter may not have any fond regard for the former, but the only way that Iraqi Communists can survive the occupation and its aftermath is to quit the Governing Council and position themselves at the forefront of the demonstrations in the streets, building up working-class support for the party in the process. Unless they can do that, they will be pretty soon back into exile or the underground. -- Yoshie *** Point of information: Iranian workers, organized into workers' councils in the petroleum sector were instrumental in making the relatively peaceful political revolution against the Shah a success through the strikes they enforced. They were rewarded with death for their unity with the religious tendencies in this battle against an oppressive regime. Blocking with fundamentalists is not a healthy thing for proletarian revolutionaries to do. Regards, Mike B) ** In the 20 years since the Islamic counter-revolution, the regime has murdered close to 100,000 political prisoners from many communist, socialist and left groups as well as from Mojahedin, a religious group. Their tormentors raped every woman and teenage girl facing the firing squad.1 Women have been degraded to second-class citizens. All workers associations, including shoras or workers councils, were disbanded and thousands of activists in the factories killed. The level of real wages fell from $11 to $1 a day.2 Today in Iran there is not a single independent union, no collective bargaining and strike action is illegal. Attacks against national minorities like the Kurds and religious minorities continue unabated. The war with Iraq to export Islamic counter-revolution to the region also brought devastation, a million dead or injured and a total damage of $500 billion. http://www.revolutionarycommunistgroup.com/frfi/150/150-irn.htm = Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do). Stephen Jay Gould http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal Find local movie times and trailers on Yahoo! Movies. http://au.movies.yahoo.com
A critique of Paul Sweezy...
I received this message from a fellow worker. I thought those interested in progressive economics might find the critique of interest. Regards, Mike B) *** http://www.wsws.org ran a four-part series on the legacy of Paul Sweezy this past week, basically a critique of his ideas from a Marxian perspective, esp his discarding of Marx's crisis theory. Aside from the Trot garbage, some interesting stuff. Jeff = Objectivity cannot be equated with mental blankness; rather, objectivity resides in recognizing your preferences and then subjecting them to especially harsh scrutiny and also in a willingness to revise or abandon your theories when the tests fail (as they usually do). Stephen Jay Gould http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - File online by April 15th http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: The Iraq Communist Party and Worker Communist Party of Iraq
This and other items are posted on the Worker Communist Party site: http://www.wpiraq.org/english/ Of the two, I prefer the WCP and their approach to politics and poltical-economy. Regards, Mike B) *** The conflict between Muqtada al-Sadr and the US is a terrorist conflict. We must confront both these two terrorist poles Over last few days, an armed fight has erupted in many Iraqi cities between Muqtada al-Sadrs group and the US troops. This conflict has so far claimed the lives of tens of innocent people in the residential slums of Baghdad and the Iraqi southern cities. Muqtada al-Sadrs group is infamous for its policies and attacks on the rights of the ordinary masses. It is one of the groups of political Islam, which presents a grim alternative for Iraqi masses and seek to impose their policies by terrorizing the masses. The current situation has offered them an opportunity to conceal this reality behind the fight against the US presence in Iraq. Obviously this fighting is another bloody outcome of the situation brought about by the US war on Iraq. Our party foresaw the dangerous outcomes of the US war and ongoing occupation of Iraq, and therefore stood firmly against the US policies. Events we are witnessing everyday prove our predictions that Iraq would slip into the swamp of continuous wars, insecurity, and political chaos. We warned against appeasing political Islam and unleashing their terrorism against the masses and the basic rights of Iraqi people. From the very beginning, after the US forces entered Iraq, we stressed the importance of freedom, human rights, and secularism for Iraqi society and the importance of restraining political Islams movements and prevent them from setting up reactionary emirates where they implement their reactionary policies and rule. However, the occupation forces appeased religious reaction, hoping that they can be subdued. As usual, the creature turns against its master and once more the deprived masses have to pay the price for the war of terrorists. Undoubtedly, Islamic terrorism has become a nightmare for humanity. It must be repudiated and defeated and its dangers removed from the life of humanity. However, the way to do so is mainly politically rather than militarily. It is impossible to fight the terrorism of political Islam on the one hand and cooperate with it on the other. Whoever wants to eradicate the main sources of Islamic terrorism must think about negating its political role rather than taking its groups as partners in power. Obviously, the US strives only to restrict terrorism when it is directed against the interests of the US government. The security and the lives of Iraqi people are not on the list of its priorities. From the first issue, al-Sadrs newspaper al-Hawza, has published threats and incited violence against freedom-loving people, communists, and the defenders of the masses rights. However, it was only viewed as a danger to security by the American authorities, when it targeted American forces. Political Islam has practiced terrorism, killed women, youth, defenders of freedom and equality, and followers of other faiths in Baghdad and the southern cities from the very early days of their inception. All these actions were not considered by the Coalition Authority, as violations against law. These Islamic groups did not become outlawed until they used their swards, stained with the blood of the ordinary people, against the Coalition Authority and coalition forces. The latest events prove that the US project to build a state in Iraq has failed. This failure is the outcome of building the state and government on the basis of sects, ethnicity and recruiting the most reactionary groups antagonistic to the aspirations of people. The project of building a state on this basis in Iraq is only materializing the grim scenario, which will constantly reproduce war and strife. We repeat the demand of the masses for immediate withdrawal of the US forces from Iraq. We call for transfer of the task of security and stability to a government formed of the representatives of the masses in collaboration with multinational forces, excluding the US and other countries, which participated in the war coalition. This interim government should disarm all militia forces and ensure security, freedom and the requirements of a decent life and also provide suitable situation to enable people to choose their government freely and consciously. The pain and sorrow of the Iraqi masses grows in the middle of the fire between these two poles of terrorism. We call on the masses eager for freedom and security to rally around this humanist and liberationist alternative, to end the grim scenario and defeat the forces that created it and rebuild the pillars of civic life in Iraq society. Worker Communist Party of Iraq April4, 2004 = Objectivity cannot be equated with mental
Re: bibliographic request
--- Steve Cohn [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Folks, I'd like to get suggestions for readings he could do for a term paper assignment that asks for a Marxist analysis of some topic (which in his case might be a Marxist analysis of the auto industry). Any ideas? You can respond on list or to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Thanks, Steve Try # The life of the automobile(R: Ilya Ehrenberg/ Pluto Press) First published seventy years ago, The Life of the Automobile is the novel of the consumer dream. Flamboyant characters like Henry Ford, J. P. Morgan and André Citroën move in and out of its pages and so, too, do the unhappy victims of the first crash and the first strikes in the car plants. Written at a time when confidence in science was supreme, The Life of the Automobile uncannily predicts the rise and fall of our romance with the car: it is as relevant now as when it was first published. 'This book is not a novel; it is a chronicle of our time' Ilya Ehrenburg 'A Futurist-Expressionist masterpiece, superbly translated' Sunday Times On the morning he was to be executed, after making a statement recanting his earlier confession, Isaac Babel pleaded with his killers to let him finish his work. That same evening Stalin called Ilya Ehrenberg and asked him if Babel was a great writer. Ehrenberg responded that he was. Zharke (pity), said Stalin. = The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart. former I.W.W. member, Helen Keller http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business $15K Web Design Giveaway http://promotions.yahoo.com/design_giveaway/
Re: Decisive showdown
http://www.wpiraq.org/english/ To: US State Department-Paul Bremer head of CPA in Iraq Yanar Mohammed, the head of the Organisation of Women's Freedom in Iraq (OWFI), is a renowned activist, and highly regarded in the world today for her brave efforts in defending women's rights in Iraq. She and the OWFI have been at the forefront of raising Iraqi women's awareness of their rights, fighting for an egalitarian secular state and full equality for women, as well as advocating for the separation of religion from the state and educational system which is a precondition for guaranteeing women's rights in Iraq. Since the recent introduction of Law Number 137 by the Iraqi Ruling Council, which is to remove the previous Personal Status Code and replace it with Sharia law, Yanar has exposed the serious threat to women's lives and rights if Sharia is imposed and organised women and men in opposition to it. As a result, she has been threatened to death within the next few days by the Army of Sahaba (Jaysh Al-Sahaba). We, the undersigned, are outraged at the threat to Yanar Mohammed's life and hold the USA government primarily responsible for the abysmal situation it has created, which now threatens the life of and affords no protection to Yanar Mohammad. We unequivocally defend her and OWFI's women's rights activists in Iraq, defend secularism, namely the separation of religion from the state and educational system and full equality for women, and strongly denounce Islamic terrorist groups. We further unequivocally denounce and hold the USA fully responsible for Yanar's life and safety. The USA government must provide her with full protection. Campaign coordinators Nadia Mahmood, and Houzan Mahmoud [EMAIL PROTECTED] and [EMAIL PROTECTED] = The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart. former I.W.W. member, Helen Keller http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business $15K Web Design Giveaway http://promotions.yahoo.com/design_giveaway/
Re: Bush's economic policies
Another angle here which most importantly ties productivity to shafting. Regards, Mike B) * Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sun, 4 Apr 2004 22:44:01 -0700 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [GuvWurld] We're More Productive. Who Gets the Money? http://www.nytimes.com/2004/04/05/opinion/05HERB.html We're More Productive. Who Gets the Money? By BOB HERBERT Published: April 5, 2004 It's like running on a treadmill that keeps increasing its speed. You have to go faster and faster just to stay in place. Or, as a factory worker said many years ago, You can work 'til you drop dead, but you won't get ahead. American workers have been remarkably productive in recent years, but they are getting fewer and fewer of the benefits of this increased productivity. While the economy, as measured by the gross domestic product, has been strong for some time now, ordinary workers have gotten little more than the back of the hand from employers who have pocketed an unprecedented share of the cash from this burst of economic growth. What is happening is nothing short of historic. The American workers' share of the increase in national income since November 2001, the end of the last recession, is the lowest on record. Employers took the money and ran. This is extraordinary, but very few people are talking about it, which tells you something about the hold that corporate interests have on the national conversation. The situation is summed up in the long, unwieldy but very revealing title of a new study from the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University: The Unprecedented Rising Tide of Corporate Profits and the Simultaneous Ebbing of Labor Compensation - Gainers and Losers from the National Economic Recovery in 2002 and 2003. Andrew Sum, the center's director and lead author of the study, said: This is the first time we've ever had a case where two years into a recovery, corporate profits got a larger share of the growth of national income than labor did. Normally labor gets about 65 percent and corporate profits about 15 to 18 percent. This time profits got 41 percent and labor [meaning all forms of employee compensation, including wages, benefits, salaries and the percentage of payroll taxes paid by employers] got 38 percent. The study said: In no other recovery from a post-World War II recession did corporate profits ever account for as much as 20 percent of the growth in national income. And at no time did corporate profits ever increase by a greater amount than labor compensation. In other words, an awful lot of American workers have been had. Fleeced. Taken to the cleaners. The recent productivity gains have been widely acknowledged. But workers are not being compensated for this. During the past two years, increases in wages and benefits have been very weak, or nonexistent. And despite the growth of jobs in March that had the Bush crowd dancing in the White House halls last Friday, there has been no net increase in formal payroll employment since the end of the recession. We have lost jobs. There are fewer payroll jobs now than there were when the recession ended in November 2001. So if employers were not hiring workers, and if they were miserly when it came to increases in wages and benefits for existing employees, what happened to all the money from the strong economic growth? The study is very clear on this point. The bulk of the gains did not go to workers, but instead were used to boost profits, lower prices, or increase C.E.O. compensation. This is a radical transformation of the way the bounty of this country has been distributed since World War II. Workers are being treated more and more like patrons in a rigged casino. They can't win. Corporate profits go up. The stock market goes up. Executive compensation skyrockets. But workers, for the most part, remain on the treadmill. When you look at corporate profits versus employee compensation in this recovery, and then compare that, as Mr. Sum and his colleagues did, with the eight previous recoveries since World War II, it's like turning a chart upside down. The study found that the amount of income growth devoured by corporate profits in this recovery is historically unprecedented, as is the low share ... accruing to the nation's workers in the form of labor compensation. I have to laugh when I hear conservatives complaining about class warfare. They know this terrain better than anyone. They launched the war. They're waging it. And they're winning it. = The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart. former I.W.W. member, Helen Keller http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business $15K Web Design Giveaway http://promotions.yahoo.com/design_giveaway/
Re: religion and US politics
To the tune, Sweet bye and bye...and a one-ah, and a two-ah... Sing out, Mike B) And the starvation army they play, And they sing and they clap and they pray, Till they get all your coin on the drum, Then they tell you when you are on the bum. If you fight hard for children and wife, Try to get something good in this life, You're a sinner and bad man, they tell, When you die you will sure go to hell. Workingmen of all countries unite, Side by side we for freedom will fight; When the world and its wealth we have gained, To the grafters we'll sing this refrain: Final chorus: You will eat, bye and bye, When you've learned how to cook and to fry; Chop some wood, do you good, And you'll eat in the sweet bye and bye. (That's no lie!) http://www.utahphillips.org/songbook/pieinthesky.html = The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart. former I.W.W. member, Helen Keller http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business $15K Web Design Giveaway http://promotions.yahoo.com/design_giveaway/
Re: Utopian Socialism
--- Laurence Shute [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Speaking of utopianism, how does Roosevelt's Economic Bill of Rights proposal from 1944 sound now: It's got my vote. ;D For more on utopianism see Rexroth: http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/communalism.htm Cheers from Perth, Mike B) = The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart. former I.W.W. member, Helen Keller http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business $15K Web Design Giveaway http://promotions.yahoo.com/design_giveaway/
Re: Mercenary Boom in Iraq Creates Tension at Home and Abroad (2nd try)
It's nice to see the commodification of patriotism making headway. Cheers, Mike B) = The best and most beautiful things in the world cannot be seen or even touched. They must be felt with the heart. former I.W.W. member, Helen Keller http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business $15K Web Design Giveaway http://promotions.yahoo.com/design_giveaway/
Re: utopianism
--- Ted Winslow [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: It seems to me what distinguishes utopian from scientific socialism is that the former pays no attention to the means through which the better society is to be brought into existence. * What a utopian that Marx was! To think and write as if socialism had something to do with free time and with freedom from the necessities imposed by the wages system. And then, his cheerleading of the Paris Commune and calling it an example of his dictatorship of the proletariat. And who can forget his naive critique of political-economy in the first chapter of the first volume of CAPITAL and the implications therein--an association of free producers owning the means of production in common and producing wealth without commodity production, indeed! Good-night Citizen Weston, wherever you are Mike B) = 1844 Paris Manuscripts, Marx makes a major point of the relationship between the sexes: The infinite degradation in which man exists for himself is expressed in this relation to the woman, http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance Tax Center - File online. File on time. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Global warming spirals upwards...
Is it time to defrost the tundra, Shrub? Regards, Mike B) from the London Independent: By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor 28 March 2004 Levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have jumped abruptly, raising fears that global warming may be accelerating out of control. Measurements by US government scientists show that concentrations of the gas, the main cause of the climate exchange, rose by a record amount over the past 12 months. It is the third successive year in which they have increased sharply, marking an unprecedented triennial surge. Scientists are at a loss to explain why the rapid rise has taken place, but fear that it could show the first signs that global warming is feeding on itself, with rising temperatures causing increases in carbon dioxide, which then go on to drive the thermometer even higher. That would be a deeply alarming development, suggesting that this self-reinforcing heating could spiral upwards beyond the reach of any attempts to combat it. The development comes as official figures show that Britain's emissions of the gas soared by three per cent last year, twice as fast as the year before. The increase - caused by rising energy use and by burning less gas and more coal in power stations - jeopardises the Government's target of reducing emissions by 19 per cent by 2010. It also coincides with a new bid to break the log jam over the Kyoto treaty headed by Stephen Byers, the former transport secretary, who remains close to Tony Blair. Mr Byers is co-chairing with US Republican Senator Olympia Snowe a new taskforce, run by the Institute of Public Policy Research and US and Australian think tanks, which is charged with devising proposals that could resolve the stalemate caused by President Bush's hostility to the treaty. The carbon dioxide measurements have been taken from the 11,400ft summit of Hawaii's Mauna Loa, whose enormous dome makes it the most substantial mountain on earth, by scientists working for the US government's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They have been taking the readings from the peak - effectively breathalysing the planet - for the past 46 years. It is an ideal site for the exercise, 2,000 miles from the nearest land and protected by freak climatic conditions from pollution from Hawaii, more than two miles below. The latest measurements, taken a week ago, showed that carbon dioxide had reached about 379 parts per million (ppm), up from about 376ppm the year before, from 373ppm in 2002 and about 371ppm in 2001. These represent three of the four biggest increases on record (the other was in 1998), creating an unprecedented sequence. They add up to a 64 per cent rise over the average rate of growth over the past decade, of 1.8ppm a year. The US scientists have yet to analyse the figures and stress that they could be just a remarkable blip. Professor Ralph Keeling - whose father Charles Keeling first set up the measurements from Mauna Loa - said:We are moving into a warmer world. http://www.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=505798host=3dir=507 = 1844 Paris Manuscripts, Marx makes a major point of the relationship between the sexes: The infinite degradation in which man exists for himself is expressed in this relation to the woman, http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance Tax Center - File online. File on time. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: utopianism
Thatcher's TINA is the opposite side of the utopian coin. Commies have to know what they want as well as what they want to leave behind in history's dustbin. Regards, Mike B) = 1844 Paris Manuscripts, Marx makes a major point of the relationship between the sexes: The infinite degradation in which man exists for himself is expressed in this relation to the woman, http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance Tax Center - File online. File on time. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: More on LNG
--- Grant Lee [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Mike, We must have that beer some time soon. Perhaps Tuesday. Is LNG the same as what's being promoted in Australia as LPG? So as when we run low on petrol (peak oil), we can sell zeez nice carbon based stuff for the burning. In Australia, most petrol stations already sell LPG or as it is known, auto gas. To use it, one needs to refit one's engine. The advantage is that it costs half what petrol costs. The short answer is that they are both petroleum products, and are both based on butane and/or propane, along with various other components. So, global warming continues apace even by using these. Perhaps peek oil becomes less of the problem though. Natural gas is natural because it more or less comes straight out of the ground; it's the stuff piped huge distances from gasfields and used in our homes. (Before large quantities of natural gas were found, coal gas [a.k.a town gas], produced by warming coal just below burning temperature and capturing the emissions, was the reticulated gas used for domestic purposes, 19th C. street lighting etc.) That's all news to me. I wondered about the old gas lighting. They still had some of those gas lamps at Vesuvio, a pub I drank at in SF, right next to City Lights Bookstore. LPG is a more recent and more volatile product of refining, designed as an internal combustion fuel, like diesel, petrol/gasoline, avgas, kerosene, paraffin, etc. Do people here get their car engines modified to burn it or do these engines have to be purchased from the get go? Both natural gas and refined petroleum gas liquefy when chilled, hence LNG and LPG. (As you probably know, most taxis in Australia run on LPG; when I was a cab driver there were some wild stories, probably urban legends, about the properties of super-chilled LPG, but I digress :-) Some Croatian guy put out a Taxis of Perth story book some time ago. Maybe you knew him. His mug shot is in the WA from this Saturday's lit section. And just to confuse you further, a handful of vehicles here have been adapted to run on LNG, although this does not seem to have been a huge success and I suspect that its lower volatility is a problem. regards, Grant Thanks!!! Mike B) = 1844 Paris Manuscripts, Marx makes a major point of the relationship between the sexes: The infinite degradation in which man exists for himself is expressed in this relation to the woman, http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance Tax Center - File online. File on time. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: frontiers of fictitious capital
Wage-slaves create the profits. They're more productive every year. Now, watch them being thrown out on their rears. Set up your rocking chairs near your graves and wait for the inevitable slip. Seems we are still a nation of Mr. Blocks. http://picturebook.nothingness.org/pbook/mrblock/display_contents/1 Mike B) = 1844 Paris Manuscripts, Marx makes a major point of the relationship between the sexes: The infinite degradation in which man exists for himself is expressed in this relation to the woman, http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance Tax Center - File online. File on time. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: American flags
--- Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The flag is ubiquitous ... I remember seeing a sea of red flags and people with Mao buttons pinned to their jackets back, waving plastic coated Red Books. Ah thsoe heady daze of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution There would be Mao (sans pin) up on the podium and every one of his cohorts would have a Mao button on. They varied in size, just like today's US flag pins. I could only see one other person in photos of that time who did not wear a Mao button. Chou-En-lai. He did sport a pin though. I was told that it read, Serve the People. Maybe Kerry should re-think his symbols and develop a flaming Twin Tower or something--sort of like the Christians with their symbols of execution/guilt. Regards, Mike B) = 1844 Paris Manuscripts, Marx makes a major point of the relationship between the sexes: The infinite degradation in which man exists for himself is expressed in this relation to the woman, http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance Tax Center - File online. File on time. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: More on LNG
--- Eugene Coyle [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Natural gas supplies are tight in the USA. Why? A discussion I'll duck today. Eugene, Grant...anybody? Is LNG the same as what's being promoted in Australia as LPG? So as when we run low on petrol (peak oil), we can sell zeez nice carbon based stuff for the burning. In Australia, most petrol stations already sell LPG or as it is known, auto gas. To use it, one needs to refit one's engine. The advantage is that it costs half what petrol costs. http://www.bp.com.au/products/LPG/lpg.asp Regards, Mike B) = 1844 Paris Manuscripts, Marx makes a major point of the relationship between the sexes: The infinite degradation in which man exists for himself is expressed in this relation to the woman, http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance Tax Center - File online. File on time. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: The Market as God
--- W.R. Needham [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Here is an earlier piece: THE GLOBAL MARKET DOCTRINE: A STUDY IN FUNDAMENTALIST THEOLOGY John McMurtry College of Arts Department of Philosophy University of Guelph http://economics.uwaterloo.ca/needhdata/McMurtry-2.html That was very amusing, John. Too bad you're not running for President of the U.S.A. But then, what legitimized American (or for that matter Canadian) party would accept such thinking? Ah-me, Mike B) = 1844 Paris Manuscripts, Marx makes a major point of the relationship between the sexes: The infinite degradation in which man exists for himself is expressed in this relation to the woman, http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance Tax Center - File online. File on time. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Oh Calcutta or Oliver Twist Today....
(Jagger-Richards, 1973) The police in New York City, they chased a boy right through the park. And in a case of mistaken identity they put a bullet through his heart. Heartbreakers with your forty-four, I wanna tear your world apart, you heartbreaker with your forty-four, I wanna tear your world apart, A ten year old girl on a street corner, Sticking needles in her arm. She died in the dirt of an alleyway, her mother said she had no chance, no chance! Heartbreaker, heartbreaker she stuck the pins right in her heart Heartbreaker, painmaker stole the love right out of your heart Heartbreaker, heartbreaker You stole the love right out of my heart Heartbreaker, heartbreaker I wanna tear your world apart. Doo doo, doo doo doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo doo doo doo, doo doo doo doo doo doo. -- Saturday November 16, 2002 The Guardian The train meanders towards Calcutta's Howrah station. We had boarded the Kalka Mail in the Indian capital at dawn the day before, and now, 24 hours later, everyone in the carriage is feeling fractious. Ajay Kumar, a bank manager from New Delhi, has a tale to tell. I brought my nephew here once to visit his grandparents and lost him in the chaos. He jumped off before the train was even at a full stop. Engulfed in the hurly-burly, he was. We didn't see him again for four years. We thought he was dead. He was only 12... But then he suddenly came back home, sent by the Calcutta police, and all the boy would say was that Howrah station was a terrible place and that he would never go back there again. Too right, pipes up Mr Vijay. These are the first words that he has spoken for the entire journey. My neighbour's son ran away to Howrah station never to be seen again. He told me he came here to search for the kid and found nothing but wild children. All of them had become thieves. Their fingers were like vipers, he told me, slithering into all your nooks and crannies. He gathers his bags to his chest. It seems an incredible story, to lose a child in the crush of a railway station for years, or for ever, but everything about Indian railways is larger than life: 37,000 miles of track, 7,000 trains running daily, serving more than 3.7 billion passengers yearly, the world's largest employer, retaining more than 1.6 million staff. Every one of its major termini is a disorientating world for a newcomer. And Howrah station is in a different league. Imagine King's Cross, St Pancras and Euston all lumped together. Like every station the world over, Howrah attracts a steady stream of the rootless and homeless. But, unlike other stations, Howrah's twilight society is a vast metropolis in itself that spills out of the concourse and down to the banks of the Hooghly river, a world that is overrun by tribes of lost children. Howrah is populated by little devils. Mrs Dutta, a widow cocooned in her white sari, weighs in with the authority of a local. The entire carriage is now animated as we pull into the largest station in Asia. The children who live here are like the locusts sent by the God of Abraham to destroy the pharaoh. Don't feel sorry for them. My advice is that once you get off this train, fly from Howrah like a garuda [a fabulous, winged human of Indian myth]! Ajay Kumar grabs a copy of the Telegraph from a newspaper-seller jogging beside the carriage window. Look at this, look at this. He reads aloud a headline: Whiff of Death, Life of Crime: kids dragged into theft trap by the train tracks. The Metro section of the Telegraph of Calcutta is focusing on one of its favourite topics. It reports how the previous day four boys aged between 10 and 12 appeared before Calcutta's juvenile court charged with pilfering luggage. A police investigation estimates that Howrah station is now home to up to 3,000 children, some of whom came of their own volition. Others were abducted or mislaid. The vast majority were apparently addicted to glue or heroin and ensnared by gang bosses who forced them into committing crimes. We are being overwhelmed, DP Tarenia, superintendent of Howrah's railway police, told the Telegraph. The adult ringleaders are very clever. They base themselves outside the station, using the kids as couriers and thieves. They know that the kids' new-found habits ensure that they don't roam too far. A charity working with street dwellers had written to us a month before describing the scale of Howrah's problem. The Society for Educational and Environmental Development (Seed) said that thousands of lost children aged between four and 12 were drawn to Howrah from somnolent villages all over India by the thrill of the track, by dreams of life in Asia's largest and most riotous station. Many of those who end up in police custody can no longer remember from where they have come, a Seed worker wrote. Some have forgotten their parents' names and even their own. Because the state government of West Bengal has scant resources, all of the lost children are forced to
Re: Employer mobilization
--- Marvin Gandall [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: American corporations are planning a major effort to muster their employees to vote Republican to counter labour unions organizing on behalf of the Democrats, according to todays Washington Post. From today's Yahoo news sources these two headlines: # Kerry Campaign Has $2.4 Million on Hand # Bush Campaign Has $110 Million on Hand Seems the capitalist political bird is flying with a very large right-wing. Regards, Mike B) = 1844 Paris Manuscripts, Marx makes a major point of the relationship between the sexes: The infinite degradation in which man exists for himself is expressed in this relation to the woman, http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance Tax Center - File online. File on time. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: Employer mobilization
--- Shane Mage [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Mike Ballard wrote: # Kerry Campaign Has $2.4 Million on Hand # Bush Campaign Has $110 Million on Hand Seems the capitalist political bird is flying with a very large right-wing... Remember that Kerry has a family fortune worth well over a half-billion dollars. Ralph Nader has characterized the Republicon/Dumbocratic political duopoly as a single party with two right wings. Don't cry for Kerry, Australia. Shane Mage No more than I'd cry if Labor lost another election to the Liberals down here, Shane. It does seem, from this vantage point, that the capitalist vulture up there, its bloated right-wing flapping strongly, is circling in on a dead or dying body-politic which would claim more surplus-value for the workers who produce it. Cheers from Perth, Mike B) = 1844 Paris Manuscripts, Marx makes a major point of the relationship between the sexes: The infinite degradation in which man exists for himself is expressed in this relation to the woman, http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance Tax Center - File online. File on time. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Two military draft bills - both introduced by Democrats....
There is a time for everything--even amensia. Cheers, Mike B) === 'Special skills draft' on drawing board Computer experts, foreign language specialists lead list of military's needs By Eric Rosenberg, Hearst Newspapers Saturday, March 13, 2004 Washington -- The government is taking the first steps toward a targeted military draft of Americans with special skills in computers and foreign languages. The Selective Service System has begun the process of creating the procedures and policies to conduct such a targeted draft in case military officials ask Congress to authorize it and the lawmakers agree to such a request. Richard Flahavan, a spokesman for the Selective Service System, said planning for a possible draft of linguists and computer experts had begun last fall after Pentagon personnel officials said the military needed more people with skills in those areas. Talking to the manpower folks at the Department of Defense and others, what came up was that nobody foresees a need for a large conventional draft such as we had in Vietnam, Flahavan said. But they thought that if we have any kind of a draft, it will probably be a special skills draft. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has said he would not ask Congress to authorize a draft, and officials at the Selective Service System, the independent federal agency that would organize any conscription, stress that the possibility of a so-called special skills draft is likely far off. A targeted registration and draft is is strictly in the planning stage, said Flahavan, adding that the whole thing is driven by what appears to be the more pressing and relevant need today -- the deficit in language and computer experts. We want to gear up and make sure we are capable of providing (those types of draftees) since that's the more likely need, the spokesman said, adding that it could take about two years to to have all the kinks worked out. The agency already has in place a special system to register and draft health care personnel ages 20 to 44 in more than 60 specialties if necessary in a crisis. According to Flahavan, the agency will expand this system to be able to rapidly register and draft computer specialists and linguists, should the need ever arise. But he stressed that the agency had received no request from the Pentagon to do so. The issue of a renewed draft has gained attention because of concerns that U.S. military forces are over-extended. Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist strikes, U.S. forces have fought two wars, established a major military presence in Afghanistan and Iraq and are now taking on peacekeeping duties in Haiti. But Congress, which would have to authorize a draft, has so far shown no interest in renewing the draft. Legislation to reinstitute the draft, introduced by Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., has minimal support with only 13 House lawmakers signing on as co- sponsors. A corresponding bill in the Senate introduced by Sen. Fritz Hollings, D-S.C., has no co-sponsors. The military draft ended in 1973 as the American commitment in Vietnam waned, beginning the era of the all-volunteer force. Mandatory registration for the draft was suspended in 1975 but resumed in 1980 by President Jimmy Carter after the Soviets invaded Afghanistan. About 13.5 million men, ages 18 to 25, are registered with the Selective Service. But the military has had particular difficulty attracting and retaining language experts, especially people knowledgeable about Arabic and various Afghan dialects. To address this need, the Army has a new pilot program underway to recruit Arabic speakers into the service's Ready Reserves. The service has signed up about 150 people into the training program. A Pentagon official familiar with personnel issues stressed that the armed forces were against any form of conscription but acknowledged the groundwork already underway at the Selective Service System. We understand that Selective Service has been reviewing existing organizational mission statements to confirm their relevance for the future, the official said. Some form of 'special skills' registration, not draft, has been a part of its review. ©2004 San Francisco Chronicle = 1844 Paris Manuscripts, Marx makes a major point of the relationship between the sexes: The infinite degradation in which man exists for himself is expressed in this relation to the woman, http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance Tax Center - File online. File on time. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: Socialism, Can You Dig It?
--- Michael Hoover [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Socialists: The zombies who won the Spanish election To paraphrase Frank Zappa: Social Democracy isn't dead. It just smells that way. That aside, this is jut another attack on the election in Spain and how it disappointed the ruling neo-Cons of America herself. Regards, Mike B) = 1844 Paris Manuscripts, Marx makes a major point of the relationship between the sexes: The infinite degradation in which man exists for himself is expressed in this relation to the woman, http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Reply to Jim C. on marginalisation
--- Jurriaan Bendien [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jim C. wrote: it is an honor to be marginalized and demonized by half-wits, sycophants and idiots and if for some reason they did like me I would worry and lose sleep what I am doing wrong - why I have not drawn the line of demarcation clear enough. * IMO, it's good when the people you don't like, don't like you too. As for marginalization, that always happens with people who don't spout the dominant ideas of any era--both the nuts and the revolutionaries. The point is to be able to differentiate between them. Cheers, Mike B) = He Who enters here Will no longer have existence; His name and soul are vanished and are gone forever. Of him there is not left a breath In all the vast world. He can never return, Nor can he ever go onward; For where he stands there he must stay. No god knows him; And unknown will he be in hell. He is not day; he is not night. He is Nothing and Never. He is too great for infinity, Too small for a grain of sand, Which, however small, Has its place in the universe. He is what has never been And never thought. Inscription over the crew's quarters in the death ship 'Yorricke' from The Death Ship: B Traven 1925 - uncredited translation http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Observations on the Socialist Scholars Conference
--- Jurriaan Bendien [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: people talk about the market as if there was only one market, which operates according to uniform principles. This is not the case at all. It is a bourgeois fetishism. In reality, class and sectional forces operate through the market, to strengthen their own position. Very well said. Applause from down under and hoping for more organizational say from the working class interests, Mike B) = ...the safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death. Voltaire http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Observations on the Socialist Scholars Conference
Doug writes: The idea of revolution in the U.S. or any of its imperial peers seems like the stuff of a drug-induced reverie right now. Yes, it's an individual prproletarian'sipipedreamt the moment. Still, the fact is that workers have erupted with revolution on their minds at various times and places on the planet since at least 1871. None of the bearded ones predicted the creation of the Paris Commune. You never know when the movement toward revolution will start to take on a life of its own. Lenin wrote in 1903 that the workers by themselves could only achieve a trade union level of coconsciousnessnd then, in 1905, the first soviet reared its organizational head, created by the women weavers of IvIvanovo Certainly at other times in the 20th Century, workers became revolutionaries. I'm sure that we all know about them, the trials, betrayals and suppressions. Still, it is an historical fact that workers started to become conscious that they were the creators and that the ruling class were the parasites. They became revolutionary in their very being and as they organized themselves, they started to make up the critical mass necessary to begin/to become their revolution. The class struggle will continue no matter what level of class consciousness exists amongst the workers. The ruling classes will always be pushing down on them, attempting to make them sacrifice more of their free-time and more of the wealth they produce. The more conscious workers are about their class interests, the more of the social product of their lalabourhey will break off for themselves e.g. through contracts with their employers or legal rights to vacation, overtime compensation, shortened work weeks and various entitlements to what they produce. Sometimes, this part of the class struggle is stupidly denounced as reformist. But as I think Marx once observed, the workers will only take on what they think they can win. He also wrote somewhere something to the effect that the workers would be revolutionary or they would be nothing. Something similar to this sentiment was penned into that grand old pop song of the movement, The International--we have been nothing now we shall be all. As for the pipipedreamsf the individual revolutionary proletarian, I'll go along with the sentiments expressed in Ruby Tuesday, Lose your dreams and you will lose your mind. Wobbly greetings, Mike B) = ...the safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death. Voltaire http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: the future of social security/medicare
Thanks for providing the article James. I agree with your assessment 100%. Best, Mike B) = ...the safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death. Voltaire http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
WMD may be found soon...
U.S. Unloading WMD in Iraq http://www.tehrantimes.com/Description.asp?Da=3/13/2004Cat=4Num=011 http://www.tehrantimes.com/Description.asp?Da=3/13/2004Cat=4Num=0 11 TEHRAN (Mehr News Agency) Over the past few days, in the wake of the bombings in Karbala and the ideological disputes that delayed the signing of Iraq¹s interim constitution, there have been reports that U.S. forces have unloaded a large cargo of parts for constructing long-range missiles and weapons of mass destruction (WMD) in the southern ports of Iraq. A reliable source from the Iraqi Governing Council, speaking on condition of anonymity, told the Mehr News Agency that U.S. forces, with the help of British forces stationed in southern Iraq, had made extensive efforts to conceal their actions. He added that the cargo was unloaded during the night as attention was still focused on the aftermath of the deadly bombings in Karbala and the signing of Iraq¹s interim constitution. The source said that in order to avoid suspicion, ordinary cargo ships were used to download the cargo, which consisted of weapons produced in the 1980s and 1990s. He mentioned the fact that the United States had facilitated Iraq¹s WMD program during the 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq and said that some of the weapons being downloaded are similar to those weapons, although international inspectors had announced Saddam Hussein¹s Baath regime had destroyed all its WMD. The source went on to say that the rest of the weapons were probably transferred in vans to an unknown location somewhere in the vicinity of Basra overnight. ³Most of these weapons are of Eastern European origin and some parts are from the former Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. The U.S. obtained them through confiscations during sales of banned arms over the past two decades,² he said. This action comes as certain U.S. and Western officials have been pointing out the fact that no weapons of mass destruction have been discovered in Iraq and the issue of Saddam¹s trial begins to take center stage. In addition, former chief UN weapons inspector Hans Blix has emphasized that the U.S. and British intelligence agencies issued false reports on Iraq leading to the U.S. attack. Meanwhile, the suspicious death of weapons inspector David Kelly is also an unresolved issue in Britain. --Occupation Forces Official Claims to Have No Information About Transfer of WMD to Iraq --- A security official for the coalition forces in Iraq said that he has not received any information about the unloading of weapons of mass destruction in ports in southern Iraq. Shane Wolf told the Mehr News Agency that the occupation forces have received no reports on such events, but said he hoped that the coalition forces would find the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction one day. Coalition forces and inspectors have so far been unable to find any Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. invaded Iraq under the pretext that Iraq possessed a stockpile of weapons of mass destruction = ...the safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death. Voltaire http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Corporations/Side Issue
--- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Mike B. writes: I'm wondering about these pressures to cut costs which Chomsky refers to. Don't they lead to the big, nice co:operative having to try to find cheaper sources of material via low wage, usually dictatorial political states? FWIW, David Schweikert's market socialist utopia of worker-managed co-operatives has two major institutions that are aimed at preventing the co-ops' profit-maximization from turning into this kind of thing: 1) a minimum wage, so that profit-max doesn't involve co-ops competing via a race to the bottom among themselves. [I think there must also be some rule about not hiring non-co-op members to do work. But I don't remember it.} 2) a special tariff on imports from countries that don't live up to labor standards. In this case, the revenues collected by making these imports more expensive to domestic consumers are supposed to be returned to the country whose imports are taxed as a lump sum (development aid). Jim Devine Thanks Jim. These reforms sound very nice and I'm sure that most people would be happier if they were put in force. Still, I remain sick to death of the poltical-economy of commodity production. Best, Mike B) = ...the safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death. Voltaire http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Corporations/Side Issue
Thanks for those insights, Paul. I really do appreciate them. They do confirm my suspicions about how the wages system and commodity production, no matter how nicely controlled, have historically tended in the direction of re-creating the social relation we know as Capital and the eventual domination of corporations and their States--totalitarian forms of economic and political rule. IMO, one needs to go in the opposite direction, away from commodity prodution and the wages system, in order to get to a classless association of producers who socially manage the means of production/consumption for use and need. Regards, Mike B) --- paul phillips [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Just to supplement Jim's comments, in Mondragon wages were set at comparable outside market wages and then profits at the end of the year were allocated to individual members savings funds which would be paid out on retirement. The purpose was to build up funds for investment in expanding the coops without having to rely on the commercial money market or banking system. All employees were required to become members except for specialists brought in for short term projects (e.g. an engineer hired to design a new product or process.) Wage differentials were regulated with a maximum differential of 3 to 1 although last I heard, they were considering raising this to 6 to 1 because of the difficulty they were having in attracting professionals as members as the co-ops moved more and more into high tech areas and into research and development. In the case of Yugoslavia, wages were set by the workers councils, usually at levels suggested by the managers. With the 1974 constitutional changes that introduced contractual self-management and the 1976 Law on Associated Labour, the financing of investment was abandoned by the state and the independent banks and was transfered to the enterprises from retained earnings and borrowings from their captive banks. This led to what became known as the 'Yugoslav disease' because the workers would distribute all the earnings in the form of wages leaving nothing for reinvestment. The enterprises would then borrow from their captive banks which basically printed the money with the resulting inflation that really was a major factor in the collapse of the system. This was, of course, illegal under Yugoslav law but by then the state authority was so dispersed and self-management so intrenched that little was done to curb it. Horvat claims, and I think he is right, that the real mistake was to abolish the state investment funds. It was during the time of the state investment funds (the period of market socialism) that the rate of economic growth and wage growth was at its highest. Nevertheless, the self-management system of setting wages did result in the most egalitarian distribution of wages in Europe, both in the capitalist and communist worlds. Paul P Devine, James wrote: Mike B. writes: I'm wondering about these pressures to cut costs which Chomsky refers to. Don't they lead to the big, nice co:operative having to try to find cheaper sources of material via low wage, usually dictatorial political states? FWIW, David Schweikert's market socialist utopia of worker-managed co-operatives has two major institutions that are aimed at preventing the co-ops' profit-maximization from turning into this kind of thing: 1) a minimum wage, so that profit-max doesn't involve co-ops competing via a race to the bottom among themselves. [I think there must also be some rule about not hiring non-co-op members to do work. But I don't remember it.} 2) a special tariff on imports from countries that don't live up to labor standards. In this case, the revenues collected by making these imports more expensive to domestic consumers are supposed to be returned to the country whose imports are taxed as a lump sum (development aid). Jim Devine Paul Phillips, Senior Scholar, Department of Economics, University of Manitoba = ...the safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death. Voltaire http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: What is this thing called love?
--- Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dennis Robertson. What Does the Economist Economize? in Economic Commentaries. London: Staples Press, 1956, pp. 147-55. He said that we economize love. Reminds me of that old song Love for Sale. Interesting that the word wares appears in the lyrics. The word for commodity in German is ware. Regards, Mike B) ** When the only sound in the empty street, Is the heavy tread of the heavy feet That belong to a lonesome cop I open shop. When the moon so long has been gazing down On the wayward ways of this wayward town. That her smile becomes a smirk, I go to work. Love for sale, Appetising young love for sale. Love that's fresh and still unspoiled, Love that's only slightly soiled, Love for sale. Who will buy? Who would like to sample my supply? Who's prepared to pay the price, For a trip to paradise? Love for sale Let the poets pipe of love in their childish way, I know every type of love Better far than they. If you want the thrill of love, I've been through the mill of love; Old love, new love Every love but true love Love for sale. Appetising young love for sale. If you want to buy my wares. Follow me and climb the stairs Love for sale. Love for sale. Written by Cole Porter; sung best by Billy Holiday. = ...the safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death. Voltaire http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Memories: speculation on the Madrid bombing....
The psy-war will continue, whoever did the bombing. Regards, Mike B) *** On March 11 about two hundred people were killed in Madrid in a bomb attack closely resembling the bombing of the Bologna railway station in Italy, more than 20 yrs ago. Terrorism in the two decades since since 1969 was controlled by the state in a strategy of tension to scare voters away from extremist parties, primarily communists, who came close to achieving power. full: http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/DRE403A.html = ...the safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death. Voltaire http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Pentagon's homeland defense chief predicts long war on terror
March 3, 2004 By Chris Strohm [EMAIL PROTECTED] The war on terrorism will last as long and take as many resources as the Cold War did, the commander of the North American Aerospace Command and Northern Command recently said. Air Force Gen. Ralph Eberhart, who was in charge of the nation's air defenses when the World Trade Center and Pentagon were attacked, said the U.S. government should prepare the public for a long haul in the global war on terrorism and use resources that were developed to fight abroad for homeland defense. Those who think that this war on terrorism is short-lived, just like the Gulf Wars, just like Kosovo and just like Bosnia, I think they're mistaken, Eberhart said Feb. 25 during a conference sponsored by the American Forces Communications and Electronics Association. It's more like the Cold War than any war we've experienced in our lifetime. It's going to take the same commitment across this great nation to win the global war on terrorism. It's probably going to take the same time frame. And it's going to take the same dedication of resources, intellectual capital and fiscal [capital]. Unless we do that and make time work for us, as it did during the Cold War ... time will work for the terrorists, and I guarantee you that's what they're counting on, Eberhart added. Eberhart worries that U.S. resolve will wane as the memory of Sept. 11 fades, leaving the nation vulnerable to more terrorist attacks. Using a sports analogy, he said resources that were developed for the away game during the Cold War and conflicts in the 1990s should be used for the home game in the realms of homeland defense and homeland security. For example, he said satellites, unmanned aerial vehicles, various sensors and, in some cases, urban warfare tactics should be used. How do we use the things we already have in a different way with different rules and a different environment than we envisioned using them? he asked. We want to fight the away game...but we must ensure that we're prepared to fight the home game. He said the country specifically needs better information sharing between the military and law enforcement agencies, more human intelligence capabilities and the ability to do wide area surveillance over the United States, preferably from space. James Carafano, senior research fellow for defense and homeland security at the Heritage Foundation, agreed that the war on terrorism will be like the Cold War. We truly believe this is going to be a long, protracted conflict, much in the same way that the Cold War was a long protracted conflict ... because you have an enemy that's dispersed and diffused and will be difficult to root out, he said. According to Carafano, the main lessons from the Cold War that should be used during the war on terrorism are that the country needs an offensive and defensive strategy for security, continued economic growth, and a commitment to the protection of privacy and civil rights. http://www.govexec.com/dailyfed/0304/030304c2.htm = ...the safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death. Voltaire http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Culture War May Find WMD
The psy-war on the ruled continues Regards, Mike B) http://www.alternet.org/members/story.html?StoryID=18090 By Laurie Spivak, AlterNet March 10, 2004 It seems that President Bush's culture war may finally succeed where Operation Iraqi Freedom did not. Namely, W and Rove's latest foray seems sure to find those long-sought-after WMDs. Weapons of Mass Destruction? No, not them. I'm talking about White Male Defectors, voters who four years ago responded favorably to Bush's no-nonsense, common man veneer, but now find themselves alienated by his increasingly expansive religious agenda and his assaults on the Bill of Rights. The march to the culture war began last summer when the Supreme Court overturned state laws that criminalize consenting sexual relationships between same sex couples. Within months, the Fab Five of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy sashayed onto the scene, Britney kissed Madonna, followed by the last straw, one of Janet Jackson's bejeweled breasts appearing at the Super Bowl. Ex post haste and as predicted by Newton's third law of the universe for every force there is an equal and opposite force the culture war offensive began. The FCC called for a thorough and swift probe of Janet's breast. A five-second delay for censors was instituted at the Grammys and the Oscars. President Bush made an official declaration of war by calling for a constitutional amendment to ban marriage between same sex couples. The Passion of the Christ, one of the most violent films ever made, stormed box offices with thousands of tickets pre-sold to church congregations. And Clear Channel pulled the plug on Howard Stern. Off the radar of all of those political pundits who listen to NPR on their morning commutes, this last strike in the culture war may prove to be the fatal misstep. Since his ouster, Howard Stern has been on the attack, taking no prisoners, and connecting the dots between the Bush administration's far-right social agenda, the religious right, the Patriot Act, media consolidation, campaign finance, cronyism, and freedom of speech. Stern has been making a powerful case that the mainstream media is missing the big picture, that Clear Channel cut him loose not because of vulgarity, but because of a shift in his political views. Far more than a question about decency standards, Stern argues, this is a question about the censorship of political speech. And if Stern is right, then nothing short of the First Amendment is at stake, and arguments about the dangers of media consolidation are no longer hypothetical. Love Howard Stern or hate him, the show that supposedly caused Clear Channel to pull the plug was no more outrageous nor more offensive than any other Stern show, and no different from the Howard Stern show that Clear Channel had aired for years. Further, if the issue was truly one of decency, then why would Clear Channel have recently signed a contract with Michael Savage, who MSNBC fired for calling a viewer a sodomite and telling him to get AIDS and die? What changed about Howard Stern's show? In Stern's own words, There's a lot of people saying that the second that I started saying, 'I think we gotta get Bush out of the presidency,' that's when Clear Channel banged my ass out of here. Stern, previously cited by Fox News as a pro-Bush celeb, had experienced a political change of heart. On February 23, Stern returned from a week's vacation and spoke about how Al Franken's book had changed his views, saying, I'm one of those 'Anybody but Bush' guys now. On February 25, just two days after Stern became critical of President Bush, Clear Channel suspended him. This isn't the first time Clear Channel, the world's biggest radio empire, has been accused of censoring or censuring entertainers for expressing views that conflicted with those of the Bush Administration. Conservative radio host Charles Goyette, who criticized President Bush on his show, claims he was punitively moved to a graveyard shift by the radio megalith. Disc jockey Roxanne Walker is suing Clear Channel for allegedly firing her for disagreeing with the President's policies in Iraq. Clear Channel now controls more than 1,200 radio stations across America and 70% of live music venues in the country. Lowry Mays, Clear Channel's founder, has been a generous and longtime supporter of the GOP and President Bush donating tens of thousands of dollars. The media giant's vice-chair Thomas Hicks bought the Texas Rangers from President Bush and his partners for $250 million, three times the original price paid. Yet Bush's cut was $14.9 million, almost 25 times his original investment. Hicks' law firm has contributed nearly $250,000 to Bush's political campaigns. Stern was the ideal sacrificial lamb for Clear Channel. In one fell swoop they could give the appearance to the FCC, investors and the public that they were cleaning up their act, while demonstrating their loyalty to the Bush Administration. However, at the same time they
Re: Corporations/Side Issue
--- paul phillips [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Mike B wrote I agree, it would be much better, if workers ran and managed the the firms in which they exploited themselves for surplus value. Honestly though, hasn't the history of creating such entities, like say Mondragon or the Amana Colony or the kibbutz movement and all the utopian socialist movements of the past-- co:operatives included--proven that they always morph into the undemocratic, totalitarian corporate structures which we see ruling us today? In other words, hasn't wage-labour always resulted in the developement of capitalist social relations? Sincerely, Mike B) What evidence is there that Mondragon has morphed into an undemocratic, totalitarian corporate structure? Last I heard it was still going strong and expanding without any change in its co-operative structure. Check out the Mondragon website. I'm wondering about these pressures to cut costs which Chomsky refers to. Don't they lead to the big, nice co:operative having to try to find cheaper sources of material via low wage, usually dictatorial political states? And apologies to all (especially to jks) for bringing this topic up again. I just don't see a way out of the tendency of the rate of exploitation to increase as the rate of democracy decreases in economies dominated by the politics of commodification. Regards, Mike B) *** Re Mondragon Reply from NC, to Jeremy Gibson, on Mondragon. You're right to take this very seriously, in my opinion. It is a very substantial experiment in participant-owned economy, including production, finance, commerce and retail; and in terms of standard economic measures, it's been quite successful. There have also been problems. To what extent these derive from implantation within a state capitalist economy of the standard kind (e.g., the pressure to shift production to low-wage high-repression areas where workers will not be owners, violating the original principle that kept this to below 10% of the workforce) or to inherent factors of institutional structure (such as separation of professional management from workforce) is not so easy to determine, and merits careful thought. There is a lot of literature on the topic. A couple of fairly recent books are David Ellerman, _The Democratic Worker-Owned Firm_, and William Kathleen Whyte, _Making Mondragon_. There was a review a year or two ago by Mike Long in Libertarian Labor Review that I thought was quite well-informed, perceptive, and interesting (it was, incidentally, critical of my own criticism of Mondragon for hierarchic managerial structures); my understanding is that he might be a little less optimistic about the prospects himself, right now. Whatever one's assessment, this is an extremely important endeavor, in my opinion, and should be carefully studied. Noam Chomsky http://www.zmag.org/forums/chomforumacrh.htm = ...the safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death. Voltaire http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Inefficiency of terminal health care provision in US
--- Chris Burford [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: An article in the latest British Medical Journal on a painful subject reports powerful data that the privatised health care market in the US is not only unfair, it is inefficient, despite the democratic fact that all parents and indeed ourselves must die some time. We all die sooner or later. The rich can buy more time than the poor, just as the rich can buy more politcal power and more justice than the poor. That's cost-effiency democracy for you. Regards, Mike B) = ...the safest course is to do nothing against one's conscience. With this secret, we can enjoy life and have no fear from death. Voltaire http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Search - Find what youre looking for faster http://search.yahoo.com
Re: FW: Slate Money: The Social Security Crisis-Solved!
But the polytricksters keep robbing the fund to pay for the various debts they incur in financing the capitalist State. So, if there's more money in it because of productivity or immigration or whatever, they'll continue to rob us to pay Paul and then say they're broke when it comes time to collect. The bottomline is that labour entitled to all the wealth it creates and that we're more productive than we've ever been. The only crisis in social security is the lack of political consciousness of this fact on the part of the working class. Best, Mike B) = Beers fall into two broad categories: Those that are produced by top-fermenting yeasts (ales) and those that are made with bottom-fermenting yeasts (lagers). http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Search - Find what youre looking for faster http://search.yahoo.com
'We face climate disaster'
This is LONDON 10/03/04 - News and city section By Ben Leapman, Evening Standard Political Reporter The Government's chief scientist today set out an apocalyptic vision of global warming bringing back the conditions which drove the dinosaurs to extinction. Professor Sir David King told a House of Lords committee that urgent action was needed within the next few years to avert the threat of sudden and severe climate change. He claimed that last summer's heatwave was a man-made event and a warning sign of worse to come. And he defied Downing Street by repeating his charges that global warming is a bigger threat than terrorism, and that Washington is failing to tackle the problem. On a recent trip to America to talk about the threat of global warming, Sir David was warned by Downing Street to limit his contact with the media. A memo from a No10 aide was leaked to a journalist in Seattle, where the scientist was delivering a lecture. Today, Sir David told the peers that the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was probably the highest it had been for 65 million years, since the Palaeocene epoch when most dinosaurs became extinct. He said the era saw a massive reduction in life on earth and added: The Antarctic was the best place to be at that time. The rest of the world was virtually uninhabitable. He also delivered a thinly-veiled attack on President George Bush by praising the effort which individual American states were making to curb their carbon dioxide emissions, in the absence of a ruling from Washington. And he accused American oil giant Exxon of funding lobbyists who are trying to undermine the consensus on global warming by suggesting that scientists are divided on the nature of the problem. Sir David said: This is the biggest issue for us to face this century. It's man-made. The science is done. It's complete. It's a matter of political understanding. I personally have little doubt that unfortunately, as time moves on, the global warming events such as the very high temperatures in Europe over the past summer and the flooding two years before will occur more frequently, and the understanding of what's driving these will become more apparent. And I think nations across the world will understand... that action has to be taken. In the past few centuries, carbon dioxide in the air has risen from 270 to 370 parts per million and is still on the increase, Sir David said. He predicted that if the level reached 550 parts per million, the polar ice caps would melt and the Gulf Stream current would be reversed, plunging Europe into a new ice age while the rest of the globe overheated. To avoid that threat, he said, the level needed to be stabilised at 450 parts per million. Find this story at http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/news/articles/9567967?version=1 ©2004 Associated New Media = Beers fall into two broad categories: Those that are produced by top-fermenting yeasts (ales) and those that are made with bottom-fermenting yeasts (lagers). http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Search - Find what youre looking for faster http://search.yahoo.com
Re: More conservative Rock-and-Roll stars
--- David B. Shemano [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am a Peanut Butter and Jello Libertarian. Actually, I disclaim all labels, except contrarian. Since this list is against liberty for Exxon-Mobil, I am for it. Liberty, equality, fraternity for the gas pumps! Best, Mike B) = Beers fall into two broad categories: Those that are produced by top-fermenting yeasts (ales) and those that are made with bottom-fermenting yeasts (lagers). http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Search - Find what youre looking for faster http://search.yahoo.com
Re: Corporations
--- andie nachgeborenen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Moreover one could imagibe a market society where, for eaxmple, the corporations did not have undemocratic power and wealth, and where the workers managed them themselves. Such corporations would be far less problematic than the largest ones we have -- including some of my clients. jks I agree, it would be much better, if workers ran and managed the the firms in which they exploited themselves for surplus value. Honestly though, hasn't the history of creating such entities, like say Mondragon or the Amana Colony or the kibbutz movement and all the utopian socialist movements of the past-- co:operatives included--proven that they always morph into the undemocratic, totalitarian corporate structures which we see ruling us today? In other words, hasn't wage-labour always resulted in the developement of capitalist social relations? Sincerely, Mike B) = Beers fall into two broad categories: Those that are produced by top-fermenting yeasts (ales) and those that are made with bottom-fermenting yeasts (lagers). http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Search - Find what youre looking for faster http://search.yahoo.com
Re: Corporations
--- joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: David B. Shemano wrote: So, when I, avoiding immiseration, get a job to work in a corporation, I am entering in a contract over which I have any control? I can bargain for my wage? I can bargain for my vacation? I can bargain for the conditions under which I work? I can decide what I'm going to work on and what the result of my work is going to be used for? The entity is an acknowledged legal fiction that minimizes transaction costs. That is all. Exxon is simply a shorthand way to describe thousands of real people acting in a united way, and the corporate form provides an expedient way of organizing those real people. Yes, an expedient way of organizing real people for the benfit of whom? Exactly Joanna...cui bono? The ever perplexing question in class society. Solid, Mike B) = Beers fall into two broad categories: Those that are produced by top-fermenting yeasts (ales) and those that are made with bottom-fermenting yeasts (lagers). http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Search - Find what youre looking for faster http://search.yahoo.com
Contracts in Iraq?
If you, or your clients, are involved in post-war Iraq contracts, please contact us to discuss your requirements and receive sample GIS data. http://www.goleaddog.com/iraq_data.htm *** Just thought you might like to see a sample. Cheers, Mike B) = Beers fall into two broad categories: Those that are produced by top-fermenting yeasts (ales) and those that are made with bottom-fermenting yeasts (lagers). http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Search - Find what youre looking for faster http://search.yahoo.com
Re: Early rationale for Iraq war
--- k hanly [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A35472-2004Mar6?language=printer The True Rationale? It's a Decade Old Capitalist imperialism? What else could it be? Best to all, Mike B) = Beers fall into two broad categories: Those that are produced by top-fermenting yeasts (ales) and those that are made with bottom-fermenting yeasts (lagers). http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Search - Find what youre looking for faster http://search.yahoo.com
An injury to one is an injury to all....
We find that the centering of the management of industries into fewer and fewer hands makes the trade unions unable to cope with the ever growing power of the employing class. The trade unions foster a state of affairs which allows one set of workers to be pitted against another set of workers in the same industry, thereby helping defeat one another in wage wars. Moreover, the trade unions aid the employing class to mislead the workers into the belief that the working class have interests in common with their employers. These conditions can be changed and the interest of the working class upheld only by an organization formed in such a way that all its members in any one industry, or in all industries if necessary, cease work whenever a strike or lockout is on in any department thereof, thus making an injury to one an injury to all. Instead of the conservative motto, A fair day's wage for a fair day's work, we must inscribe on our banner the revolutionary watchword, Abolition of the wage system. http://www.iww.org.au/history/tombarker/preamble.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31981-2004Mar4.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A31981-2004Mar4.html What Wal-Mart Has Wrought By Harold Meyerson Friday, March 5, 2004; Page A23 LOS ANGELES -- This city obliterates its past, so it shouldn't be surprising that few Angelenos remember the role that unions played in making Los Angeles the epicenter of America's epochal post-World War II prosperity. But the greatest new housing boom in world history didn't descend on L.A. through some random selection in the 1940s, '50s and '60s. The huge housing tracts were initially clustered around correspondingly huge aerospace factories, whose unionized workers could afford to buy new homes. That was then. Since the Cold War's end, the aerospace industry and other unionized manufacturing here have drastically downsized. The service sector waxed as manufacturing waned, but most nonprofessional service-sector jobs are nonunion and low-wage. The great exception was supermarket work. For decades, the industry and its union -- the United Food and Commercial Workers (UFCW) -- signed contracts that gave supermarket workers employer-paid health insurance and decent wages. Five months ago, however, three major chains put forth a new contract that would turn supermarket employment into low-wage work with few benefits. Sixty thousand workers across Southern California either struck or were locked out. So many shoppers refused to cross the picket lines that the three chains lost more than $1.5 billion in sales. But late last week, the union threw in the towel. The contract that the unhappy but increasingly desperate workers ratified created a lower pay scale for all new hires. It virtually ended the markets' responsibility for new workers' health coverage: Employers agreed to contribute $4.60 hourly for current workers' health plans but just $1.35 hourly for those of future employees. In the words of one union (but not UFCW) leader, the contract is the beginning of the road to the Wal-Martization of the industry. Like many of his peers, this union chief is livid at the industry, but he is also angry at the UFCW. For months the union treated the strike not as a national battle but as a regional one. The union did not organize community and consumer support groups that could have rallied against the chains; it was very slow to leverage union pension funds to go after the corporations' finances. In short, the union really had no plan to win the strike if the companies held out -- and since their outlets outside Southern California were unaffected, the companies could hold out better than workers subsisting on meager strike benefits. In fact, this was anything but a regional strike. The union's contracts will expire in other parts of the country later this year, but now its strike fund is depleted and the companies can point to the new contract as setting the pattern for the industry. Close to 1 million unionized supermarket jobs may now be downward-bound. And while Americans have focused, understandably, on the ongoing evisceration of manufacturing jobs, the downscaling of service-sector jobs in the age of Wal-Mart poses no less a threat to the existence and idea of a working-class career. Fortunately, the defeat of the supermarket strikers wasn't the only union news in the past week. Last Thursday two of the nation's most proficient organizing unions (there aren't a lot of them) announced that they were merging. UNITE, the clothing and textile union, and HERE, the hotel and restaurant union, agreed to join forces in what will be a remarkable organization of largely immigrant workers in routinely low-wage industries. UNITE and HERE may well be the two most tenacious unions out there: UNITE fought for 17 years before organizing J.P. Stevens, while HERE's successful strike against the Frontier Hotel on the Las Vegas Strip -- a strike that ran six years,
Re: FW: Ellsberg defends Kerry against Republican charges of treason
--- Peter Hollings [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This appeared on Daniel Ellsberg's list and I thought it might be of interest. Peter Hollings That it was. Thank-you, Peter. Regards, Mike B) = Beers fall into two broad categories: Those that are produced by top-fermenting yeasts (ales) and those that are made with bottom-fermenting yeasts (lagers). http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Search - Find what youre looking for faster http://search.yahoo.com
Re: new mercenarism redux
As a Marine Corps drill sargent once remarked to me and a bunch of recruits: YOU are ALL professional killers NOW! DO YOU UNDERSTAND THAT GIRLS? To which, we made the standard reply, YES SIR! Regards, Mike B) = Beers fall into two broad categories: Those that are produced by top-fermenting yeasts (ales) and those that are made with bottom-fermenting yeasts (lagers). http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Search - Find what youre looking for faster http://search.yahoo.com
Re: any comments?
--- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: March 2, 2004/New York TIMES NEWS ANALYSIS Medicare and Social Security Challenge By EDMUND L. ANDREWS In theory, the two giant trust funds are accumulating huge surpluses that can be used to pay for benefits when the baby boomers retire and the systems start taking in less than they are paying out. In practice, those surpluses are being spent, and the government will probably have to borrow enormous sums to meet its obligations to retirees. The wages system is the greatest robbery in history. The amount of wealth which is stored away for wage-slaves once they retire is being squandered. It is time to start telling people the truth, said Laurence Kotlikoff, a professor of economics at Boston University and a longtime analyst of the issue. Suggesting that some minor adjustments to Social Security will solve the problem is doing a disservice. I doubt whether the good professor will be telling the truth about how the working class has increased its productivity many times over during the decades when the baby boomers were creating wealth for the capitalist class and that the major adjustment that needs to be made is to siphon off a portion of that wealth (by taxation--who care really how it's done) and put it into social security. After all, that would be silly and besides he's got his tenure to think of. Mr. Greenspan, the Federal Reserve chairman, provoked a political tempest when he told members of the House Budget Committee last week that Congress needed to trim future Social Security and Medicare benefits to head off a fiscal calamity in decades to come. It's the same old tired song of the ruling class: workers must sacrifice so that WE the deserving can lap up the cream. Mr. Greenspan proposed adjustments in how the government increases benefits to keep up with inflation and suggested pushing back retirement ages to better reflect increased life expectancy. Actually, just the opposite should happen. Workers should retire earlier so that reserve army of labour shrinks, solving both the unemployment problem and the miserably low wages which the lower strata of the working class receive for services rendered. The adjustments which should be made have to do with adjusting the rate of surplus value extracted from the ever more productive working class. Democrats immediately attacked the proposed cuts, saying they would be unnecessary if President Bush had not been running up large annual budget deficits just before millions of baby boomers reach retirement age. Cutting Social Security benefits is not the way to rein in the irresponsible Bush budget deficit,'' chided Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Senate Democratic leader. A correct observation from the left-wing of the capitalist bird. President Bush and Republican lawmakers distanced themselves as well, saying that much of the problem could be averted by setting up private savings accounts. A ridiculous proposal which plays to the ignorance of the working class about who actually produces the wealth and who retains the lion's share. But as precarious and uncertain as long-range forecasts are, most experts agree that the combined challenges of Social Security and Medicare are too big to be addressed without politically painful remedies. The bourgeois are ever ready to sacrifice to the last proletarian. The workers should return the favour. Unfortunately, the constant drum beat coming from their ever turned on TVs will fill their poor open minds with bourgeois arguments. After all, Jesus suffered, so you must suffer. The Bible and the TV tell us so. The number of retirees is expected to soar from about 40 million today to more than 76 million by 2030, which means that fewer dollars will be coming in from payroll taxes and many more dollars will be going out in retirement and medical benefits. Like I said, take out of the suplus value which is being created. It's bloody simple. The oldest baby boomers turn 65 in 2011, and by one estimate a husband and wife who retire that year are likely to collect $700,000 in benefits before they die. I can see the pundits favouring new Federally funded euthanasia programs. Trustees of the Medicare and Social Security funds predict that the two programs will run surpluses of more than $200 billion a year for at least the next decade. But the Medicare trust fund will start running deficits in 2013 and run out of money by 2026. Starting in 2018, the Social Security System starts paying out more than it takes in and will have to dip into its trust fund. By 2044, the trust fund will be exhausted. This bourgeois claptrap is exhausting me. Most experts say the problems of Social Security are much smaller and more predictable than those of Medicare, because retirement formulas are fairly simple and the cost of benefits depends primarily on demographic
Re: aristide kidnapped
They destroyed the village in order to save it. A friend from up there in the Northern Hemisphere related the below to me. Best, Mike B) *** On Pacifica's Democracy Now today, Rep Maxine Waters, Dem, Ca (from LA) said she spoke with Jean Aristide, he was under guard in Central Africa Republic, stated he did not resign, but was forced out by a group consisting of US Ambassador Foley accompanied by 10 US Marines, who told him he was leaving or else he'd be dead, put him on a helicopter and flew him out. The media continue to use the resigned word: they should be called on it. Jeff --- Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Even CNN is now covering the story of the kidnapping? How will this play out in the US? Why has France been so complicit? Is it just the claim for reparations? I think France has other means to deflect such a claim? Is this a test for Venez., for Cuba? Perhaps it is for the best that Sweezy does not have to see what we have come to. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu = You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. --Mark Twain http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Get better spam protection with Yahoo! Mail. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
Re: Haiti Coup
For those of you at your computer, or SF-local, tune into KPFA (www.kpfa.org) and listen to blow by blow coverage of the coup in Haiti. Armed US/CIA-affiliated terrorists (Guy Philippe, FRAPH), that US media have portrayed as nonviolent, are engaged in a bloody purge of Aristide supporters, including the mayor of Port-au-Prince. US helicopters are circling Haiti, watching the bloodbath. According to a report from Australian media just forwarded to listeners via KPFA, Aristide did not flee. The popular and elected president of Haiti was KIDNAPPED at 2am by US Marines AT GUNPOINT. This hours after Bush declared Aristide unfit to lead, and after days of Bush administration officials intentionally doing nothing. I must give Dennis Bernstein major kudos for his Haiti coverage. Too bad he does not devote the same energy to other issues. L --- Shane Mage [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Eyewitnesses reported on Pacifica reveal that Aristide DID NOT RESIGN! He was kidnapped at about 5:30 AM by US Marines directly supervised by the US Ambassador. At the moment he is on a US plane somewhere, incommunicado. The State Department refuses to give any information whatsoever to Representatives Rangel and Walters. Meanwhile the US installed death squads have begun massacring Aristide's supporters. The homes of the mayors of Port Au Prince and P´etionville have been burned down. Refugees are being kidnapped on the high seas and returned to the death squads. All, as usual, in total violation of US and International law. After this, how can anyone still be so foolish as to expect that Ubu and the Bushits will permit a mere election to effect a regime change in God's Country? Shane Mage Thunderbolt steers all things. Herakleitos of Ephesos, fr. 64 = You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. --Mark Twain http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Get better spam protection with Yahoo! Mail. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
Re: DeLong on Paul Sweezy
--- Eubulides [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/movable_type/Index.html/ Have fun *** I would like Brad De Long to be remembered for the following passage: How Strong a Supporter of International Capital Mobility Can I Still Be? How Strong a Supporter of International Capital Mobility Can I Still Be? J. Bradford DeLong U.C. BerkeleyFebruary 27, 2004; draft 2.0; 1843 wordsFifteen years ago, I at least found that was easy to be in favor of international capital mobility. It was easy to preach for an end to the systems of controls on capital that hindered the flow of investment financing from one country to another. Capital controls created large-scale opportunities for corruption. Whoever got the scarce permissions to borrow abroad had a good chance of becoming rich, and somehow those who got the scarce permissions to borrow abroad often turned out to be married to the niece of the vice-minister of finance. A highly corrupt society is one in which tax rates are idiosyncratically and randomly high, and cannot be a productive society. Eliminating capital controls seemed likely to be a great help in the general anti-corruption drive.Capital controls kept the level of investment in peripheral developing countries down. This seemed to be a very bad thing. Higher investment boosts the capital stock and so directly raises labor productivity and wages. It also acts as a carrier for those important parts of technological advance that are embodied in... Brad De Long called himself an intellectual. Brad De Long publicly revised his opinion on an analytical issue in order to agree with the position taken by the ruling class of a genocidal system. Fill in the blank: Brad De Long is a . Best, Mike B) P.S. re: Haiti.. That wasn't my view of Dennis Bernstein. I was just reporting what someone else from Berkeley said. I don't even live in the USA. My radio is basically glued to ABC Classics. __ Do you Yahoo!? Get better spam protection with Yahoo! Mail. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
Re: article on MR website
Michael Yates wrote: I have an article posted on the Monthly Review website (www.monthlyreview.org) titled Can the Working Class Change the World? It is a write up of a talk I gave to the Marxist School in Sacramento. Comments welcome. In his article, Michael Yates wrote: What went wrong? Looking at the broad sweep of history, we can perhaps identify some of the forces at work and bad decisions taken. First, as Marx pointed out, capitalism creates workers in its own image. It is hard for workers to grasp the nature of their circumstances, to see that they create capital rather than the other way around. So even when organized, they strive for a fairer wage and better conditions rather than an end to the wage labor system that is the ultimate source of their circumstances. The system appears to them as inevitable and immutable, though they might win a better deal. Of course, this notion is reinforced by a vast propaganda machine, including the media and the schools. ** Mike B) comments: Here, I would more deeply develop observations on reification and the fethishism of commodities i.e. how upside down perceptions of how the world works are nurtured by social forces (family, schooling, peers, State) into succeeding generations of worker/producers. Workers seeing themselves primarily as consumers and not as producers puts them into a submissive psychological state of mind, where the best they can do is to ask for a fair day's wage for a fair day's work. If workers don't consciously understand that their skills and time are commodities in the marketplace, they remain lost, suseptible to manipulation by others as opposed to candidates for making change for themselves. When they see themselves as the producers of the world, they can begin to accumulate the integrity necessary to organize to reclaim the the social product of their labour. They can begin to see that solidarity with other workers gives them more power in the marketplace. They can begin to see why they feel helpless and powerless as atomised individuals who define their freedom in negative terms i.e. my freedom is directly related to your unfreedom : women, blacks, other workers, other nationalities and so on. = You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. --Mark Twain http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Get better spam protection with Yahoo! Mail. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
Re: Paul Marlor Sweezy (1910-2004)
Farewell fellow worker. Mike B) __ Do you Yahoo!? Get better spam protection with Yahoo! Mail. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
Re: declaration of war?
Here's an interesting take: http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17969 The Class Warrior.. Struggle continues, Mike B) --- Jurriaan Bendien [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think you are correct. I already experienced this in the 1980s in New Zealand, it's just that the USA is much wealthier and so the processes work themselves out full with a greater time-lag. That is why we need good research, good argument, good professional organisation, and not lefty rhetoric and character assassinations. J. - Original Message - From: Eugene Coyle [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 27, 2004 7:19 AM Subject: [PEN-L] declaration of war? Wasn't Greenspan's little talk about cutting taxes for the rich and cutting Social Security pretty close to an open declaration of class war? Gene Coyle = You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. --Mark Twain http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Get better spam protection with Yahoo! Mail. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
Re: demo fervor
Here's a note from a friend of mine. Cheers, Mike B) * The Bush economic team is apparently at a loss on how to stop the erosion of US manufacturing jobs. (I think every monthly employment report for more than 40 consecutive months has shown declining manufacturing employment.) Their latest idea: the most recent Economic Report of the President questions whether fast-food restaurants should continue to be counted as part of the service sector or should now be reclassified as manufacturers. Here's a response from one Midwestern legislator. -Original Message- A letter sent from Rep. John Dingell (D-MI) to Council of Economic Advisors Chairman Greg Mankiw. No, this is not a parody. Here's the actual letter: http://www.house.gov/dingell/Manufacturing_letter_02-23-04.pdf ** Dr. Gregory Mankiw Chairman, Council of Economic Advisers Executive Office of the President Washington, DC 20502 Dear Dr. Mankiw I noticed in the recently released Economic Report of the President that there was some consternation in the defining of manufacturing. It could be inferred from your report that the administration is willing to recognize drink mixing, hamburger garnishing, French/freedom fry cooking, and milk shake mixing to be vital components of our manufacturing sector. I am sure the 163,000 factory workers who have lost their jobs in Michigan will find it heartening to know that a world of opportunity awaits them in high growth manufacturing careers like spatula operator, napkin restocking, and lunch tray removal. I do have some questions of this new policy and I hope you will help me provide answers for my constituents: - Will federal student loans and Trade Adjustment Assistance grants be applied to tuition costs at Burger College? - Will the administration commit to allowing the Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) to fund cutting edge burger research such as new nugget ingredients or keeping the hot and cold sides of burgers separate until consumption? - Will special sauce now be counted as a durable good? - Do you want fries with that? Finally, at a speech he gave in Michigan this past September, Secretary Evans announced the creation of a new Assistant Secretary for Manufacturing. While I understand that it takes a while to find the right candidate to fill these positions, I am concerned that five months after the announcement no Assistant Secretary has yet been named. I do, however, know of a public official who would be perfect for the job. He has over thirty years of administrative and media experience, has a remarkable record of working with diverse constituencies, and is extraordinarily well qualified to understand this emerging manufacturing sector: the Hon. Mayor McCheese. With every good wish, Sincerely, John D. Dingell = You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. --Mark Twain http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
Re: Uganda's northern rebellion
--- Diane Monaco [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: BBC News 23 feb, 2004 The rebels are led by the mysterious Joseph Kony, who was part of a previous rebel force in northern Uganda. He has said that he wants to rule Uganda according to the Biblical Ten Commandments. But the rebel practice of abducting schoolchildren, forcing the girls to be sex slaves and the boys to be brutal killers flies in the face of Christian teachings. Lot offered his daughters to a crowd and the crowd raped them all night and according to one story in the BIBLE, God sent an angel of death down to Egypt to kill all the first born children who were living in housing not painted with sacrificial lamb's blood. Regards, Mike B) = You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. --Mark Twain http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
Re: dems, etc
--- Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: joanna bujes wrote: I gag at the thought of voting for Kerry, but I will because I think Bush and his gang are not merely reacting to the passing of the post-war boom: I think they are looters and goons who will continue to wreak destruction if re-elected. I don't see a huge diff between dems and repubs. BUT Kerry won't privatize social security and won't make the judicial appointments that the Bush gang will make. It's not much, but it's something. The dems also set up different expectations for fairness and legality than do the repub/neo-cons. Thank you. Such a vote not only doesn't pre-empt organizing outside the electoral realm, it probably makes it easier. Our revolutionary maximalists don't like to hear that - for them, it's either all or nothing. Which means it's usually nothing. Doug As one of the revolutionary maximalists, I agree. I find it easier to live, work and organize under the Democratic Party faction than the Republican one. I think most people in the world at large would agree. Maybe most of us aren't as masochistic as the Repugs believe us to be. For the abolition of wage-slavery, Mike B) = You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. --Mark Twain http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
Re: dems, etc
Right on, Ralph. If the chickenhawks want an empire, let them be ready to send their own kids to battle for it. Lest we forget, it was Nixon who got rid of the draft in favour of the all (poor prole) volunteer military. Regards, Mike B) --- Ralph Johansen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: What of the contradiction here: if the right really wants to get behind a draft, why is it that the sponsors in the House are Conyers and Rangel, who would be in favor because 1) selective service this time would, in the bill drafted, not allow loopholes for the privileged, and 2) the absence of a 'patriotic' rationale for this blighted war in the minds of more and more people could very well spell disaster for the sitting administration? Ralph - Original Message - From: Yoshie Furuhashi [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Friday, February 20, 2004 3:20 PM Subject: Re: dems, etc snip * For Immediate Release: Wednesday, January 8, 2003 Contact: Andy Davis (202) 224-6654 Hollings Sponsors Bill to Reinstate Military Draft Senator cites current heavy use of reserves and national guard, need for shared sacrifice WASHINGTON, D.C. - U.S. Sen. Fritz Hollings last night introduced the Universal National Service Act of 2003, a bill to reinstate the military draft and mandate either military or civilian service for all Americans, aged 18-26. The Hollings legislation is the Senate companion to a bill recently introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.) and Rep. John Conyers (D-Mich.). Specifically, the bill mandates a national service obligation for every U.S. citizen and permanent resident, aged 18-26. To that end, the legislation authorizes the President to establish both the number of people to be selected for military service and the means of selection. Additionally, the measure requires those not selected specifically for military service to perform their national service obligation in a civilian capacity for at least two years. Under the bill, deferments for education will be permitted only through high school graduation. . . . http://hollings.senate.gov/~hollings/press/2003108C06.html * snip = You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. --Mark Twain http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
Re: dems, etc
--- Yoshie Furuhashi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Good point. Here's another question my little sister asked me the other day: If the popular vote doesn't mean anything, why do we vote? Joanna The popular vote doesn't mean much, but voter registration work does. While you are registering people to vote, you can hand out information about local Green Party meetings, anti-war gatherings, information about the Green, Democratic, and Republican candidates, etc. You can ask them if they also want to sign onto mailing lists to receive action alerts, etc. -- Yoshie Excellent points, Joanna and Yoshie! Best, Mike B) = You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. --Mark Twain http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
Re: dems, etc
--- Yoshie Furuhashi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Right on, Ralph. If the chickenhawks want an empire, let them be ready to send their own kids to battle for it. Lest we forget, it was Nixon who got rid of the draft in favour of the all (poor prole) volunteer military. You see, that's why I think it will take a Democratic president to reinstate the draft. A Republican president won't be able to inspire such a response. -- Yoshie IMHO, the anti-war, anti-empire movement will grow substantially if *everyone* in the mother country has to face the existential consequences which go hand in hand with the militarized maintenance of imperialism, *not* just those desperate enough to sell their skills to the volunteer armed forces for a living. Best, Mike B) = You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. --Mark Twain http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
Re: new frontiers of property rights theory in China
--- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Mike Ballard wrote: Neither wage-labour nor state ownership will ever lead to anything but capitalism. I think that this is simplistic. State ownership of the means of production seems necessary to the rise of socialism and the eventual abolition of classes. If the State is a really a proletarian democracy i.e. if the working class actually controls the State and uses it to dominate the capitalists whose property has not yet been expropriated, then I'd say you were right. As for simplicity, the formula State ownership = some kind of socialism, I'd disagree and side with Engels who made the following distinctions: *** I say have to. For only when the means of production and distribution have actually outgrown the form of management by joint-stock companies, and when, therefore, the taking them over by the state has become economically inevitable, only then -- even if it is the state of today that effects this -- is there an economic advance, the attainment of another step preliminary to the taking over of all productive forces by society itself. (Here following, note that Engels is pointing to the alienation from power of the working class i.e. society--MB)But of late, since Bismarck went in for state-ownership of industrial establishments, a kind of spurious socialism has arisen, degenerating, now and again, into something of flunkeyism, that without more ado declares all state ownership, even of the Bismarckian sort, to be socialistic. Certainly, if the taking over by the state of the tobacco industry is socialistic, then Napoleon and Metternich must be numbered among the founders of socialism. If the Belgian state, for quite ordinary political and financial reasons, itself constructed its chief railway lines; if Bismarck, not under any economic compulsion, took over for the state the chief Prussian lines, simply to be the better able to have them in hand in case of war, to bring up the railway employees as voting cattle for the government, and especially to create for himself a new source of income independent of parliamentary votes -- this was, in no sense, a socialistic measure, directly or indirectly, consciously or unconsciously. Otherwise, the Royal Maritime Company, [116] the Royal porcelain manufacture, and even the regimental tailor of the army would also be socialistic institutions. http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/notes.htm But it isn't sufficient. In the USSR, there was state ownership, but the CPSU eventually decided to try to modernize, to turn many of its members into capitalists. But that isn't inevitable. Working class resistance could have prevented the re-establishment of capitalism (the conversion of bureaucratic socialism into capitalism) under Gorbachev and Yeltsin and could have pushed the system in the direction of socialism (definition #2). In my opinion, the problem with this analysis is that it assumes that the working class was conscious enough to steer the State back onto the road to communism. I don't think it was. I wish it had been. I wish that the working class had been in control of the USSR. But long before the time Gorby came to power, the working class of the USSR had lost all but a bureaucratic job opportunity of controlling the State apparatus. Instead, the working class of the USSR increasingly took on the passive stance of consumers and had become so enamoured with the successes of capitalist West that it (well most of it anyway) welcomed the end of Communist Party dominance over the political economy. The majority thought (wrongly, of course) they'd finally get the commodity laden paradise they'd been promised for decades by embracing free-enterprise. VOA was very popular. Obviously, the CPSU had done little or nothing to encourage the working class to grasp actually existing State power during its tenure as self-appointed, vanguard bureaucracy. Instead of leading the masses via their bastardized wage-system to communism, they led them to love the idea of being dazzled with successful capitalism a la America herself. Best, Mike B) = You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. --Mark Twain http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
Re: Where did the money go ?
--- Jurriaan Bendien [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The Council on Foreign Relations Task Force Report states that, for every dollar spent on the military, the US spends seven cents on diplomacy. Source: http://www.atimes.com/atimes/China/FB19Ad01.html * I remember this guy from China once said something like, Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun. Regards, Mike B) = You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. --Mark Twain http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
Re: The Powell melt-down symptom
--- Jurriaan Bendien [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is Colin Powell melting down? Suddenly, he stopped and glared at a Democratic committee staffer who was smirking and shaking his head. Are you shaking your head for something, young man back there? Powell grumbled. Are you part of the proceedings?. *** Reads like the voice of Army officer barking at a raw recruit during inspection, Wipe that smirk off your face, private! Regards, Mike B) = You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. --Mark Twain http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
Re: bragging
--- MICHAEL YATES [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Among the texts John is using is my new book Naming the System: Inequality and Work in the Global Economy. Go Michael (both of yuz)! Keep on keepin' on. You and John and the rest of you lurking out there are really doing something worthwhile. Don't give up the fight! Regards, Mike B) = You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. --Mark Twain http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
Re: new frontiers of property rights theory in China
Neither wage-labour nor state ownership will ever lead to anything but capitalism. Regards, Mike B) = You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus. --Mark Twain http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
Re: Anti-psychiatry
Just thought I'd share this insight with you on the question. Regards, Mike B) *** The analyst and his patient share this alienation, and since it does not usually manifest itself in any neurotic symptom but rather as the hallmark of mental health, it does not appear in the revisionist consciousness. When the process of alienation is discussed, it is usually treated, not as the whole that it is, but as a negative aspect of the whole. To be sure, personality has not disappeared: it continues to flower and is even fostered and educated -but in such a way that the expressions of personality fit and sustain perfectly the socially desired pattern of behavior and thought. They thus tend to cancel individuality. This process, which has been completed in the mass culture of late industrial civilization, vitiates the concept of interpersonal relations if it is to denote more than the undeniable fact that all relations in which the human being finds itself are either relations to other persons or abstractions from them. --Marcuse in EROS AND CIVILIZATION __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: The economy - a new era?
My interpretation of the rise of the corporate form is that Marx thought it might encourage workers to see that they were already doing all the work to keep society going (the capitalists being by then totally divorced of any productive function) and doing it co:operatively so why not do it for themselves, dump the bosses of their backs so to speak and control producton from the bottom up, soviet style, without Party bosses over them. Regards, Mike B) --- Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Marx represents an important boys in that tradition. He believed that the rise of the corporate form would provide the basic infrastructure for a socialist society. This part of his work, of course, conflicted with the other part that promotes socialism from below. On Thu, Feb 12, 2004 at 09:39:46AM -0800, Devine, James wrote: there's an old tradition of contrasting free competition with socialism, as if the centralization of capital were the same as socialism. Edward Bellamy's nationalism (what might be called state socialism today) was based on the idea that the merger of all of the businesses into one big cartel would make it easy to expropriate capital. Schumpeter also seemed to think that the centralization of capital would lead to socialism. This view is often merged with the idea that statism = socialism, so that any kind of centralism = socialism. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu = Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen. Norman Mailer http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal http://greetings.yahoo.com.au - Yahoo! Greetings Send your love online with Yahoo! Greetings - FREE!
Re: Psychoanalysis Re: happiness is a transitory state
Thanks Doug. I will look at what Judith Butler has written on the subject mentioned in my questions. The way you have summarized her views, they seem to mesh pretty closely with my own readings and interpretations of Freud, Reich, Fromm and Marcuse. Cheers, Mike B) --- Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Mike Ballard wrote: Why *don't* the proles revolt? After all, capitalism is way past its use-by date by now. That's demonstrated on this list daily by the countless, excellent news articles posted. Could this condition originate in a conservative psychological character structure rooted in the upbringing of individuals within societies where the monogamous-paternalistic family, private property and the State permeate social relations? Or, if you want to take it further, there's Judith Butler's argument - rooted in that silly doctrine called psychoanalysis - that subjects are formed in subjection (through deference to authority figures, like parents, and their successors, like language and law), and that attitude of deference to authority persists through life, for fear of the disintegration of the subject. Doug = Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen. Norman Mailer http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: Psychoanalysis Re: happiness is a transitory state
--- Bill Lear [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Monday, February 9, 2004 at 10:28:36 (-0500) Doug Henwood writes: ... Or, if you want to take it further, there's Judith Butler's argument - rooted in that silly doctrine called psychoanalysis - that subjects are formed in subjection (through deference to authority figures, like parents, and their successors, like language and law), and that attitude of deference to authority persists through life, for fear of the disintegration of the subject. So, our chains become part of us, and attempts to break the chains therefore hurt? Bill ...the drive for freedom inherent in human nature, while it can be corrupted and suppressed, tends to assert itself again and again. Eric Fromm I see humans (and most humans are workers at this stage in history) as having an instinct for freedom. According to my reading of Freud, this instinct is repressed in order to maintain civilization i.e. whatever class society exists at the moment. Fromm says the majority, need the myths and idols to endure... They learn, through their upbringing, to give over their own power to authorities outside themselves. Of course, when it is a mutually beneficial relation as say between a student wanting to learn Spanish and a teacher who want to teach Spanish, the authority increases the person's freedom. This is *not* what I mean by authoritarianism. The relation all too often goes the other way though--authority is imposed in order to cultivate a subservient psychology in the individual. Further, as Marx pointed out in the fetishism of commodities section of CAPITAL V.I, producers are imbued with a kind of upside-down thinking pattern in societies dominated by commodity production or reified thinking as Lukacs would have it. Freud would say that they are *born* to do this, it's biological and therefore, the revolt against civilization is narcissistic/futile and those who are infected with dicontent have neuroses : they need to undergo psychoanalysis in order to get them back on track, to conform with the mainstream i.e. the dominant ideology. Poor Siggy, living in the soon to be annexed Austria. But as Fromm pointed out, The criticism of democratic society should not be that people are too selfish; this is true but it is only a consequence of something else. What democracy has not succeeded in is to make the individual love himself; that is, to have a deep sense of affirmation for his individual self, with all his intellectual, emotional, and sensual potentialities. A puritan-protestant inheritance of self-denial, the necessity of subordinating the individual to the demands of production and profit, have made for conditions from which Fascism could spring. The readiness for submission, the perversion of courage which is attracted by the image of war and self-annihilation, is only possible on the basis of a - largely unconscious - desperation, stifled by martial songs and shouts for the Führer. The individual who has ceased to love himself is ready to die as well as to kill. The problem of our culture, if it is not to become a fascist one, is not that there is too much selfishness but that there is no self-love. The aim must be to create those conditions which make it possible for the individual to realise his freedom, not only in a formal sense, but by asserting his total personality in his intellectual, emotional, sensual qualities. This freedom is not the rule of one part of the personality over another part - conscience over nature, Super-Ego over Id - but the integration of the whole personality and the factual expression of all the potentialities of this integrated personality. Regards, Mike B) = Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen. Norman Mailer http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: Psychoanalysis Re: happiness is a transitory state
--- Marvin Gandall [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: And if you want to take it even further -- that capitalism has been able to deliver, despite episodic crises, a modest but steady improvement in living standards and working conditions for the mass of Western wage- and salary-earners, despite Marx's belief that it had exhausted its historic potential a century and a half ago and would produce only increasing immiseration. I think that we see a lot of this immiseration around us and in the world at large (just look at the posts on PEN-L), if not on the sidewalks of urban centres of cities without safety nets, where capitalism's casualties push shopping carts full of cans and clothes. I personally think that neither Marx nor Engels thought that capitalism had reached the end of its trail or *would* reach it, until the workers became class conscious enough to see that the system had outlived any usefulness for them. Unfortunately, they hadn't been exposed to discoveries which would later be made, concerning the psychodynamics of dominance and submission. This is not to say that they were not hopeful as they sifted through the historical acts of revolt against the dominations of their day e.g. the Paris Commune. It's reasonable to expect that a reversal of this historic trend, especially if abrupt, would be accompanied by a radically changed psychology, with few exceptions, among friends, neighbours, relatives, and co-workers desperate to recover their lost jobs, homes, and income. We caught a glimpse of the relationship between economic (in)security and personal and political psychology during the Great Depression through World War II until the system righted itself. I agree with this emphasis, Marvin. From what I have been able to observe in my life, it has been the existential shocks which have disrupted the ossified, psychological response patterns of everyday life. I remember the December, 1972 bombing of Hanoi harbours and the almost instananeous reaction of people to take to the streets to protest it. Hanoi's harbours were full of Chinese and Soviet ships back then. During that bried moment in time, people were discussing possibilities that everything could change. What was passing for normalcy was being called into question, big time. Best, Mike B) Doug Henwood wrote: Or, if you want to take it further, there's Judith Butler's argument - rooted in that silly doctrine called psychoanalysis - that subjects are formed in subjection (through deference to authority figures, like parents, and their successors, like language and law), and that attitude of deference to authority persists through life, for fear of the disintegration of the subject. Mike Ballard wrote: Why *don't* the proles revolt? After all, capitalism is way past its use-by date by now. That's demonstrated on this list daily by the countless, excellent news articles posted. Could this condition originate in a conservative psychological character structure rooted in the upbringing of individuals within societies where the monogamous-paternalistic family, private property and the State permeate social relations? = Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen. Norman Mailer http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: Psychoanalysis Re: happiness is a transitory state
Mike Ballard wrote: I see humans (and most humans are workers at this stage in history) as having an instinct for freedom. According to my reading of Freud, this instinct is repressed in order to maintain civilization i.e. whatever class society exists at the moment. --- Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This was stated with much more force in Rousseau. Plus, in Rousseau you didn't get all sorts of nonsense about interpreting dreams, etc. Rousseau's, 'Noble Savage' is an idealized stereotype of indigenous people as found throughout the world. Its features include the exaltation of the character in wilderness settings, an exaggeration of physical prowess, a simplistic interpretation of the indigenous world view, and an assignment of lofty virtues and innocence to the common man. http://www.mvc.dcccd.edu/ArtScien/Engl/INSTRUCT/grimes/2327/BC-Primitivism.html The concept of man that emerges from Freudian theory is the most irrefutable indictment of Western civilization and at the same time the most unshakable defense of this civilization. According to Freud, the history of man is the history of his repression. Culture constrains not only his societal but also his biological existence, not only parts of the human being but his instinctual structure itself. However, such constraint is the very precondition of progress. Left free to pursue their natural objectives, the basic instincts of man would be incompatible with all lasting association and preservation: they would destroy even where they unite. The uncontrolled Eros is just as fatal as his deadly counterpart, the death instinct. Their destructive force derives from the fact that they strive for a gratification which culture cannot grant: gratification as such and as an end in itself, at any moment. The instincts must therefore be deflected from their goal, inhibited in their aim. Civilization begins when the primary objective namely, integral satisfaction of needs is effectively renounced. http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/eros-civilisation/ch01.htm Eric Fromm wrote: ... potentialities. A puritan-protestant inheritance of self-denial, the necessity of subordinating the individual to the demands of production and profit, have made for conditions from which Fascism could spring. I wasn't aware that Spain, Portugal and Italy were particularly puritan-protestant. I wasn't aware that the fascistic Catholics of Spain, Portugual and Italy in the 20th Century weren't proclaiming the need for self-denial, the necessity of subordinating the individual to the demands of production and profit--via Corporatist ideology and State supported violence. Best, Mike B) = Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen. Norman Mailer http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: Psychoanalysis Re: happiness is a transitory state
--- Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Carrol Cox wrote: 1. What validity does psychoanalysis have? Answer: [P]sychonalysis [is] a mistake that grew into an imposture. Frederick C. Crews, Preface to _Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend_, ed. Frederick Crews (New York: Viking, 1998), p. ix. Well that settles it! Next question? Doug Why *don't* the proles revolt? After all, capitalism is way past its use-by date by now. That's demonstrated on this list daily by the countless, excellent news articles posted. Could this condition originate in a conservative psychological character structure rooted in the upbringing of individuals within societies where the monogamous-paternalistic family, private property and the State permeate social relations? Best, Mike B) = Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen. Norman Mailer http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: happiness is a transitory state
Psychoanalysis has changed its function in the culture of our time, in accordance with fundamental social changes that occurred during the first half of the century. The collapse of the liberal era and of its promises, the spreading totalitarian trend and the efforts to counteract this trend, are reflected in the position of psychoanalysis. During the twenty years of its development prior to the First World War, psychoanalysis elaborated the concepts for the psychological critique of the most highly praised achievement of the modem era: the individual. Freud demonstrated that constraint, repression, and renunciation are the stuff from which the free personality is made; he recognized the general unhappiness of society as the unsurpassable limit of cure and normality. Psychoanalysis was a radically critical theory. Later, when Central and Eastern Europe were in revolutionary upheaval, it became clear to what extent psychoanalysis was still committed to the society whose secrets it revealed. The psychoanalytic conception of man, with its belief in the basic unchangeability of human nature, appeared as reactionary; Freudian theory seemed to imply that the humanitarian ideals of socialism were humanly unattainable. Then the revisions of psychoanalysis began to gain momentum. Eros and Civilization. Herbert Marcuse 1955 http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/eros-civilisation/epilogue.htm = Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen. Norman Mailer http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: happiness is a transitory state
Psychoanalysis has changed its function in the culture of our time, in accordance with fundamental social changes that occurred during the first half of the century. The collapse of the liberal era and of its promises, the spreading totalitarian trend and the efforts to counteract this trend, are reflected in the position of psychoanalysis. During the twenty years of its development prior to the First World War, psychoanalysis elaborated the concepts for the psychological critique of the most highly praised achievement of the modem era: the individual. Freud demonstrated that constraint, repression, and renunciation are the stuff from which the free personality is made; he recognized the general unhappiness of society as the unsurpassable limit of cure and normality. Psychoanalysis was a radically critical theory. Later, when Central and Eastern Europe were in revolutionary upheaval, it became clear to what extent psychoanalysis was still committed to the society whose secrets it revealed. The psychoanalytic conception of man, with its belief in the basic unchangeability of human nature, appeared as reactionary; Freudian theory seemed to imply that the humanitarian ideals of socialism were humanly unattainable. Then the revisions of psychoanalysis began to gain momentum. Eros and Civilization. Herbert Marcuse 1955 http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/marcuse/works/eros-civilisation/epilogue.htm Regards, Mike B) = Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen. Norman Mailer http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: happiness is a transitory state
--- joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Freud does not constitute the alpha and omega of psychoanalysis, just one of its more conservative currents. For more forward looking work, look to Otto Fenichel, Thomas Szasz, Reich, Laing, etc. Joanna Agreed. But I think he made a cogent observation about the nature of the happiness of the free individual in class dominated versions of civilization: Herbert Marcuse wrote: its development prior to the First World War, psychoanalysis elaborated the concepts for the psychological critique of the most highly praised achievement of the modem era: the individual. Freud demonstrated that constraint, repression, and renunciation are the stuff from which the free personality is made; he recognized the general unhappiness of society as the unsurpassable limit of cure and normality. Razing Consciousness by yours truly (to the tune of Pop Goes the Weasel) Bitch on the job and then go home Turn on, tune in, zone out From cradle to grave Electric eyes Flick in your own Shoot souless rays And time tested lies Through all the Dicks and Janes The moral of this old re-run Spin's on the wage-slaves Your flattened, empty, plasticized lives Repeat the corporate game Wake up to work, complain then go home Flash! goes amnesia Forget the pain And don't organize It's television pleasure Then off to work to agonize And sweat for capital's gain = Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen. Norman Mailer http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: budget bull
--- Dan Scanlan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: When is a plan not really a plan? Philadelphia Inquirer Thu, Feb. 05, 2004 They do have a plan: fund Empire building, cut the producing class out of the wealth they create of as much as you can. Regards, Mike B) = Each day a few more lies eat into the seed with which we are born, little institutional lies from the print of newspapers, the shock waves of television, and the sentimental cheats of the movie screen. Norman Mailer http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
The Ice Age Cometh
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=17711 By Thom Hartmann, Thomhartmann.com February 1, 2004 While global warming is being officially ignored by the political arm of the Bush administration, and Al Gore's recent conference on the topic during one of the coldest days of recent years provided joke fodder for conservative talk show hosts, the citizens of Europe and the Pentagon are taking a new look at the greatest danger such climate change could produce for the northern hemisphere a sudden shift into a new ice age. What they're finding is not at all comforting. In quick summary, if enough cold, fresh water coming from the melting polar ice caps and the melting glaciers of Greenland flows into the northern Atlantic, it will shut down the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe and northeastern North America warm. The worst-case scenario would be a full-blown return of the last ice age in a period as short as 2 to 3 years from its onset and the mid-case scenario would be a period like the little ice age of a few centuries ago that disrupted worldwide weather patterns leading to extremely harsh winters, droughts, worldwide desertification, crop failures, and wars around the world. Here's how it works. If you look at a globe, you'll see that the latitude of much of Europe and Scandinavia is the same as that of Alaska and permafrost-locked parts of northern Canada and central Siberia. Yet Europe has a climate more similar to that of the United States than northern Canada or Siberia. Why? It turns out that our warmth is the result of ocean currents that bring warm surface water up from the equator into northern regions that would otherwise be so cold that even in summer they'd be covered with ice. The current of greatest concern is often referred to as The Great Conveyor Belt, which includes what we call the Gulf Stream. The Great Conveyor Belt, while shaped by the Coriolis effect of the Earth's rotation, is mostly driven by the greater force created by differences in water temperatures and salinity. The North Atlantic Ocean is saltier and colder than the Pacific, the result of it being so much smaller and locked into place by the Northern and Southern American Hemispheres on the west and Europe and Africa on the east. As a result, the warm water of the Great Conveyor Belt evaporates out of the North Atlantic leaving behind saltier waters, and the cold continental winds off the northern parts of North America cool the waters. Salty, cool waters settle to the bottom of the sea, most at a point a few hundred kilometers south of the southern tip of Greenland, producing a whirlpool of falling water that's 5 to 10 miles across. While the whirlpool rarely breaks the surface, during certain times of year it does produce an indentation and current in the ocean that can tilt ships and be seen from space (and may be what we see on the maps of ancient mariners). This falling column of cold, salt-laden water pours itself to the bottom of the Atlantic, where it forms an undersea river forty times larger than all the rivers on land combined, flowing south down to and around the southern tip of Africa, where it finally reaches the Pacific. Amazingly, the water is so deep and so dense (because of its cold and salinity) that it often doesn't surface in the Pacific for as much as a thousand years after it first sank in the North Atlantic off the coast of Greenland. The out-flowing undersea river of cold, salty water makes the level of the Atlantic slightly lower than that of the Pacific, drawing in a strong surface current of warm, fresher water from the Pacific to replace the outflow of the undersea river. This warmer, fresher water slides up through the South Atlantic, loops around North America where it's known as the Gulf Stream, and ends up off the coast of Europe. By the time it arrives near Greenland, it's cooled off and evaporated enough water to become cold and salty and sink to the ocean floor, providing a continuous feed for that deep-sea river flowing to the Pacific. These two flows warm, fresher water in from the Pacific, which then grows salty and cools and sinks to form an exiting deep sea river are known as the Great Conveyor Belt. Amazingly, the Great Conveyor Belt is only thing between comfortable summers and a permanent ice age for Europe and the eastern coast of North America. Much of this science was unknown as recently as twenty years ago. Then an international group of scientists went to Greenland and used newly developed drilling and sensing equipment to drill into some of the world's most ancient accessible glaciers. Their instruments were so sensitive that when they analyzed the ice core samples they brought up, they were able to look at individual years of snow. The results were shocking. Prior to the last decades, it was thought that the periods between glaciations and warmer times in North America, Europe, and North Asia were gradual. We knew from the fossil record that the
Re: The Ice Age Cometh
--- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm no expert on this, but it sure seems that any kind of global change in the average temperature would disrupt weather patterns all over the world, causing severe winters, droughts, etc. I'm just an aspiring prolo-author. But the noises coming out of the Establishment press indicate that we're in BIG trouble because of the ineptitude of our philistine ruling class. More here: http://www.fortune.com/fortune/print/0,15935,582584,00.html Hopefully, we'll sublate the capitalist system before it's too late. Regards, Mike B) = The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. Henry David Thoreau http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/
Re: Important Book
--- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: the word progressive is profoundly ambiguous. is it Bull Moose and Teddy Roosevelt? or Lafollette? or Henry Wallace? * To me progress is a directional verb with the direction being towards greater freedom. If the movement leads elsewhere, it is not progressive. Regards, Mike B) = The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. Henry David Thoreau http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/
Re: Important Book
Right you are, James. The freedom of Bush and the bourgeoisie is for me and my class, un-freedom--continued wage-slavery. On the other hand, freedom for me and my class from wage-slavery should translate into a generalized freedom for all. Progressively yours, Mike B) P.S. Jurrien, thanks for that excellent explanation of how Marx fits into the Green question. On the question of the reality of the, if enough cold, fresh water coming from the melting polar ice caps and the melting glaciers of Greenland flows into the northern Atlantic, it will shut down the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe and northeastern North America warm. see: http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=484490host=3dir=58 Geoffrey Lean, Global Warming Will Plunge Britain into New Ice Age 'Within Decades' --- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: but what is freedom? to Dubya, it's greater freedom for capital, especially for his cronies. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine the word progressive is profoundly ambiguous. is it Bull Moose and Teddy Roosevelt? or Lafollette? or Henry Wallace? * To me progress is a directional verb with the direction being towards greater freedom. If the movement leads elsewhere, it is not progressive. Regards, Mike B) __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/
Re: Japan: forex interventions ii
--- Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This is the first that I heard that China is putting its reserves in Euros. Is that true? Euros reserve increasing According to comments made by the head of the State Administration of Foreign Exchange and vice governor of the central bank Guo Shuqing in November, China had been slowly increasing the amount of euros in its foreign currency reserves. China was unconcerned by fluctuations in the euro's value and felt 1it was vital for the country to diversify its foreign exchange holdings, Guo said. Stocks of the euro have been growing in our foreign currency reserves, he said at a reception sponsored by the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China. During the past two months we have bought a lot of euros. In the coming months, we'll buy more, Guo said. full: http://fpeng.peopledaily.com.cn/200201/07/print20020107_88188.html Regards, Mike B) = The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. Henry David Thoreau http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/
Cost-efficiency democracy and retirement......
No nursing home for us. We're checking into the Holiday Inn! With the average cost for a nursing home per day reaching $188.00, there is a better way when we get old feeble. I have already checked on reservations at the Holiday Inn. For a combined long term stay discount and senior discount, it's $49.23 per night. That leaves $138.77 a day! for: 1. Breakfast, lunch and dinner in any restaurant I want, or room service. 2. Laundry, gratuities and special TV movies. Plus, they provide a swimming pool, a workout room, a lounge, washer, dryer, etc. Most have free toothpaste and razors, and all have free shampoo and soap. They treat you like a customer, not a patient. $5 worth of tips a day will have the entire staff scrambling to help you. There is a city bus stop out front, and seniors ride free. To meet other nice people, call a church bus on Sundays. For a change of scenery, take the airport shuttle bus and eat at one of the nice restaurants there. While you're at the airport, fly somewhere. Otherwise, the cash keeps building up. It takes months to get into decent nursing homes. Holiday Inn will take your reservation today. And you are not stuck in one place forever, you can move from Inn to Inn, or even from city to city. Want to see Hawaii? They have a Holiday Inn there too. TV broken? Light bulbs need changing? Need a mattress replaced? No problem. They fix everything, and apologize for the inconvenience. The Inn has a night security person and daily room service. The maid checks to see if you are OK. If not, they will call the undertaker or an ambulance. If you fall and break a hip, Medicare will pay for the hip, and Holiday Inn will upgrade you to a suite for the rest of your life. And no worries about visits from family. They will always be glad to find you, and probably check in for a few days mini-vacation. The grandkids can use the pool. What more can you ask for? So, when I reach the golden age I'll face it with a grin. Just forward all my email to: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Regards, Mike B) = The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. Henry David Thoreau http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/
Nanoparticles in the Brain
Thought this might be of interest. Nanotech is getting a lot of attention by those in the van of the capitalist production process these days. Regards, Mike B) *** Tiny particles enter the brain after being inhaled JIM GILES / Nature 9jan04 Nanoparticles - tiny lumps of matter that could one day to be used to build faster computer circuits and improve drug delivery systems - can travel to the brain after being inhaled, according to researchers from the United States1. The finding sounds a cautionary note for advocates of nanotechnology, but may also lead to a fuller understanding of the health effects of the nanosized particles produced by diesel engines. Gunter Oberdorster of the University of Rochester in New York and colleagues tracked the progress of carbon particles that were only 35 nanometres in diameter and had been inhaled by rats. In the olfactory bulb - an area of the brain that deals with smell - nanoparticles were detected a day after inhalation, and levels continued to rise until the experiment ended after seven days. These are the first data to show this, says Ken Donaldson, a toxicologist at the University of Edinburgh, UK. I would never have thought of looking for inhaled nanoparticles in the brain. Substances such as drugs can cross from the brain into the blood, but Oberdorster believes that the carbon nanoparticles enter the brain by moving down the brain cells that pick up odours and transmit signals to the olfactory bulb. He says that unpublished work, in which his group blocked one of the rats' nostrils and tracked which side of the brain the nanoparticles reached, appears to confirm this. Little is known about what effect nanoparticles will have when they reach the brain. The toxicity of the nanoparticles that are currently being used to build prototype nanosized electronic circuits - such as carbon nanotubes, which are produced in labs around the world - has not been thoroughly assessed. But Donaldson says that there is a growing feeling that other nanoparticles, such as those produced by diesel exhausts, may be damaging to some parts of our body. He estimates that people in cities take in about 25 million nanoparticles with every breath. These particles are believed to increase respiratory and cardiac problems, probably by triggering an inflammatory reaction in the lungs. Oberdorster's unpublished work includes evidence that some nanoparticles may trigger a similar inflammatory reaction in the brains of rats. References Oberdorster, G. et al. Translocation of inhaled ultrafine particles to the brain. Inhalation Toxicology, (in press, 2004). source: http://cmbi.bjmu.edu.cn/news/0401/42.htm 17jan04 http://www.mindfully.org/Health/2004/Nanoparticles-Enter-Brain9jan04.htm = The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them. Henry David Thoreau http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/
Regional cooling...
As the Walrus and the Carpenter discuss the relative merits of cabbages and kings, we oysters sit in spetacular bemusement. Regards, Mike B) From the London Independent: Global warming will plunge Britain into new ice age 'within decades' By Geoffrey Lean, Environment Editor 25 January 2004 Britain is likely to be plunged into an ice age within our lifetime by global warming, new research suggests. A study, which is being taken seriously by top government scientists, has uncovered a change of remarkable amplitude in the circulation of the waters of the North Atlantic. Similar events in pre-history are known to have caused sudden flips of the climate, bringing ice ages to northern Europe within a few decades. The development - described as the largest and most dramatic oceanic change ever measured in the era of modern instruments, by the US Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute, which led the research - threatens to turn off the Gulf Stream, which keeps Europe's weather mild. If that happens, Britain and northern Europe are expected to switch abruptly to the climate of Labrador - which is on the same latitude - bringing a nightmare scenario where farmland turns to tundra and winter temperatures drop below -20C. The much-heralded cold snap predicted for the coming week would seem balmy by comparison. A report by the International Geosphere-Biosphere Programme in Sweden - launched by Nobel prize-winner Professor Paul Crutzen and other top scientists - warned last week that pollution threatened to trigger changes with catastrophic consequences like these. Scientists have long expected that global warming could, paradoxically, cause a devastating cooling in Europe by disrupting the Gulf Stream, which brings as much heat to Britain in winter as the sun does: the US National Academy of Sciences has even described such abrupt, dramatic changes as likely. But until now it has been thought that this would be at least a century away. The new research, by scientists at the Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Acquaculture Science at Lowestoft and Canada's Bedford Institute of Oceanography, as well as Woods Hole, indicates that this may already be beginning to happen. Dr Ruth Curry, the study's lead scientist, says: This has the potential to change the circulation of the ocean significantly in our lifetime. Northern Europe will likely experience a significant cooling. Robert Gagosian, the director of Woods Hole, considered one of the world's leading oceanographic institutes, said: We may be approaching a threshold that would shut down [the Gulf Stream] and cause abrupt climate changes. Even as the earth as a whole continues to warm gradually, large regions may experience a precipitous and disruptive shift into colder climates. The scientists, who studied the composition of the waters of the Atlantic from Greenland to Tierra del Fuego, found that they have become very much saltier in the tropics and subtropics and very much fresher towards the poles over the past 50 years. This is alarming because the Gulf Stream is driven by cold, very salty water sinking in the North Atlantic. This pulls warm surface waters northwards, forming the current. The change is described as the fingerprint of global warming. As the world heats up, more water evaporates from the tropics and falls as rain in temperate and polar regions, making the warm waters saltier and the cold ones fresher. Melting polar ice adds more fresh water. Ominously, the trend has accelerated since 1990, during which time the 10 hottest years on record have occurred. Many studies have shown that similar changes in the waters of the North Atlantic in geological time have often plunged Europe into an ice age, sometimes bringing the change in as little as a decade. The National Academy of Sciences says that the jump occurs in the same way as the slowly increasing pressure of a finger eventually flips a switch and turns on a light. Once the switch has occurred the new, hostile climate, lasts for decades at least, and possibly centuries. When the Gulf Stream abruptly turned off about 12,700 years ago, it brought about a 1,300-year cold period, known as the Younger Dryas. This froze Britain in continuous permafrost, drove summer temperatures down to 10C and winter ones to -20C, and brought icebergs as far south as Portugal. Europe could not sustain anything like its present population. Droughts struck across the globe, including in Asia, Africa and the American west, as the disruption of the Gulf Stream affected currents worldwide. Some scientists say that this is the worst-case scenario and that the cooling may be less dramatic, with the world's climate flickering between colder and warmer states for several decades. But they add that, in practice, this would be almost as catastrophic for agriculture and civilisation. http://news.independent.co.uk/low_res/story.jsp?story=484490host=3dir=58 =
Re: an exchange with aaron brown of CNN on David Kay and Scott Ritter
Excellent work Steve. Shows what CAN be done. Thanks, Mike B) = I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. I goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people. -- Eduardo Galeano http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/
