Re: What is the total wealth ?
Wealth is liberty... it is disposable time and nothing more. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Housing bust...
Jim Devine wrote, July 25, 2004 GRETCHEN MORGENSON Housing Bust: It Won't Be Pretty I don't know the web-page that this came from. New York Times Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: u/p labor
Speaking of unproductive labour, I just posted to another mailing list -- swt, shorter worktime list -- a draft essay about a seminal discussion of unproductive labour, fictitious capital, inconvertible paper money and superfluous things. It's an introductory essay to Charles Wentworth Dilke's anonymously published pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, mentioned in a footnote in the preface by Engels to vol. II of Capital. According to Engels, Marx saved the pamphlet from falling into oblivion. Well, Marx may have saved it from total oblivion, but I transcribed it and posted it on the internet! Here's the essay: http://www.worklessparty.org/timework/srintro.pdf ...and here's the transcribed pamphlet: http://www.worklessparty.org/timework/source%20and%20remedy.pdf Jim Devine wrote, there's economics and then there's economics. the unproductive/productive distinction may make no sense in terms of neoclassical economics (though many NCs see government labor as unproductive), but it makes sense in terms of Marxian economics. U labor doesn't contribute to surplus-value, whereas P labor does. I don't know if the concept U/P is very useful, though. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: SOCIAL MOBILITY
Is it possible that some Republican delegate might hop in a pedicab this summer and pause to ruminate on an economy in which some are always pulled and more and more are always pulling? No. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: The End Of Management?
I love it! Total Information Awareness meets ParEcon. Robin Hanson, may I introduce you to Robin Hahnel... Charles Brown wrote, TIME.com: The End Of Management? -- Jul. 12, 2004 http://www.time.com/time/insidebiz/article/0,9171,1101040712-660965,00.html Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: The End Of Management?
Daniel Davies wrote, Hanson put out a press release last year saying that the revised Policy Analysis Market would be up and trading by March 2004. I emailed him offering to bet $500 that it wouldn't, but I never got a reply. However, had he accepted your wager, Daniel, he would have paid up: http://www.mail-archive.com/[EMAIL PROTECTED]/msg07948.html Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: The Chicago Smirk
Although they may not explicitly acknowledge it -- even to themselves -- Friedman and his minions know intuitively that they are re-telling old folk tales. Each time they retell these tales the audience nods appreciatively, that's how it goes! that's how it goes! Neither the audience nor the storyteller distinguishes between the conventional story and how it really is and for good reason: no one can say how it really is. That's how it goes means little more than that's the way we've heard it so many times before. Critics don't have a story. They have to settle for poking holes in the myth. The holes are soon glossed over and easily forgotten. Myth is memorable and critique is not. Critique is hard work and has to begin again each time. Those who have their own, non-conforming story are cranks. Because no one has heard their story before, they feel they have to prove it; something that can't be done. The surest sign of a crank is insistence on the obviousness of what nobody else sees. If you have to insist, you're probably deluded. The tellers of the old tales don't have to insist because people readily recognize the old tales. How could they not? They've heard them so many times before. The smirk comes from the self-assurance that one's opponents are either critics or cranks, or more precisely that one's opponents will likely be seen by the audience as critics or cranks. Nobody loves a critic, no one takes a crank seriously. There's no fraud like an avuncular old fraud. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Sowell
David Shemano: The argument is about the effect of minimum wage laws, and if you can't figure out the difference between minimum wage laws and rising wages, Yes, indeed the argument is about the effect of minimum wage laws and it is based on a fallacy -- actually several fallacies -- including the shape of the theoretical labour supply curve, the relationship between low-wage labour and investment, the confusion of labour rates and labour costs, the competitiveness of labour markets and probably several others that other Pen-lers could name. No doubt there is SOME level of minimum wage that may cause a decline in employment but even then it's possible that the higher wage more than compensates for the loss of employment both collectively and individually. For example, someone would possibly be better off working 9 months of the year at $10 an hour than working 12 months at $7 an hour. They might even be better off with a lower total income earned during a shorter time period. The minimum wage/unemployment argument is a defiant throwback to archaic wages-fund doctrine. I would have every sympathy with Sowell's observation of the bureaucratic response to his suggestion about empirical validation provided he also noticed that the incentives for conservative economists are equally incompatible with the economic laws they purport to uphold and investigate. These folks are neither entrepreneurs nor scientists. They're an ecclesiatical order entrusted with an infallible, ineffable doctrine. Is it an accident that their conclusions invariably exalt the rationality of privilege? Or does that just happen to be true? It may have been painfully clear to Sowell that as they pushed up minimum wage levels... employment levels were falling, but such painful clarity doesn't constitute empirical validation. Nor, despite the shocked looks on the bureaucrats' faces, would his data on sugar cane have definitively answered the question. Considering the theoretical slimness of Sowell's moment of truth, his painful clarity takes on a fascinating rhetorical function. Does it ground his reasoning in a moment of *passion* arising out of some kind of vicarious suffering in identication with the poor? Or is it his annoyance at the obtuseness of the bureaucrats who are unable to see what he so clearly (he thinks) sees? Or is there perhaps some kind of fusion there where Sowell's suffering the bureaucratic fools in itself redeems the suffering of the poor, regardless of any policy consequences? I only pray that if I ever see the light, it not be the glow of such thread-bare doctrinal kaka. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
the Lump redux
As some Pen-l oldtimers may recall, in the late 1990s I embarked on a quest for the locus classicus of the oddly-named lump-of-labour fallacy. I eventually identified an article by D.F. Schloss as the source. Now, it turns out, the critique of the fixed amount of work, if not the whimsical name appeared (first?) in Marx's 1865 pamphlet Wages, price and profit. The Economist magazine has now appropriated my discovery of D.F. Schloss as the source of the phrase without, however, bothering to mention how Schloss's usage and its historical context contradict the Economist own propagandistic use. For more on this story see my MaxSpeak post at http://maxspeak.org/mt/archives/000587.html Tom Walker 604 255 4812
...and take Bonzo with you!!
Classic Steve Bell: http://www.guardian.co.uk/cartoons/stevebell/0,7371,1233866,00.html Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: More on Hubbert
It may be helpful to non-statisticians to point out that the bell curve is not a theory, a fact or a physical law. It is an observed regularity that occurs often when looking at large numbers of cases. It has to do with the randomness of the distribution of the cases. Not all phenomena group themselves into normal distributions. All Hubbert was saying was that on the basis of analysis of past data it looks as if oil exploration and oil production tend to fit under such a curve, when dealing with large numbers of cases. There are no guarantees that world exploration and world production follows the same patterns that exploration and production in Texas and the United States did. But -- barring a big and unlikely surprise -- the evidence is in for Texas and the U.S. They did indeed exhibit a bell curve in their historical pattern of discovery and production. It is Hubbert's track record, not his theory that is compelling. This is how actuarial tables work, too. We simply base future expectations on statistical generalizations from past experience. Knowing what we know about the apparently normal distribution over time of discovery and production, it would hypothetically be possible to deliberately counteract the statistical expectation -- to force production to continue to increase past the peak. But it would not be economically rational to do so, which is no guarantee it won't happen. Here's the deal: we burn oil to run machines that save labour time. If it takes more labour time than it saves to find and produce the oil, it's not economical to do so. It becomes a value-subtracting activity. The Soviet Union in its last decades was plagued with value-subtracting state owned enterprises. That's one of the big reasons for glasnost and perestroika -- to try to restore a semblance of economic rationality. The U.S. has also fallen far off the economic rationality wagon in the past couple of decades but so far has been able to finesse that embarrassment thanks to the sovereign US Dollar. The recycling of petrodollars has, of course, played a major role in propping up the US Dollar. So there's obviously a lot more at stake here than whether it takes more or less than a barrel of oil's worth of work to produce a barrel of oil. But its a continuous circuit and eventually the level of feedback becomes more than the crisis managers can handle. NEW YORK (Reuters) - The dollar hit a two-month low against the euro and a three-month low versus the Swiss franc on Wednesday on concerns surging oil prices could hurt the U.S. economy and delay an expected rise in U.S. interest rates. Friday's May U.S. employment report is seen as critical for the Federal Reserve in deciding whether to raise interest rates from a 46-year low of 1 percent, as the market expects it to at its June 29-30 monetary policy meeting. Higher rates would be positive for the dollar by providing incentive for foreign investors to buy U.S. interest-bearing assets, thereby increasing demand for dollars. The backup in U.S. interest rates of the last week could be dollar supportive but that is mitigated by the small amount of the increase, the economic implications of high oil prices, as well as the increase in terrorism concerns following the weekend attacks in Saudi Arabia, said Bob Lynch, currency strategist at BNP Paribas in New York. Investors have been selling the dollar since late May after oil prices soared to their highest in two decades. Europe and Asia may also be hurt by high energy costs, but many investors saw currencies such as the euro and the Swiss franc as good defensive bets. These currencies are typically less sensitive to global growth cycles. Europe is less exposed than the U.S. to oil, less exposed to any disruptions in the Middle East, and this is driving gains in euro/yen and euro/dollar, said Patrick Bennett, currency strategist at Commerzbank in London. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Hubbert's peak
To be fair to Hubbert and his followers, I think Hubbert's basic point was precisely about the need for technical change and energy efficiency. We are not starting from zero. He was quoted in a 1983 article, We have an enormous amount of existing technical knowledge. It's just a matter of putting it all together. We still have great flexibility but our maneuverability will diminish with time. That's not exactly *ignoring* technical change. It's more like advocating it. To the extent his followers anticipate misery and conflict, it may have much to do with the hitherto desulatory track record of the market and the state about responding to the need for change. Another point is that the scale and scope of change necessary here is epochal not merely adaptive fine tuning. Who's to say whether a couple of world wars and a depression is not too high a price to pay for the transition? People who ignore such details of technical change are not really giving misery and conflict their due. Can you see the devil in the previous sentence? Like Keynes(!), Hubbert talked about the need to move from growth to a steady-state economy. And, by the way, he does mention the need for stabilization of the world's population. Come to think of it, though, one couldn't have a growing population and a steady-state economy without at least a quantitative immiseration of that pop. could one? Do people actually read anything by Hubbert before they pronounce sentence on him or do they rely entirely on second-hand characterizations and vague impressions? You know, I happen to think Hubbert may be right for reasons that have little to do with proven or probable or as yet undiscovered reserves of petroleum. He may be right for all the wrong reasons. Rather than marking some half-way point along the road to depletion, I would see the impasse as arising from the Contradiction between the foundation of bourgeois production (value as measure) and its development... ...to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose 'powerful effectiveness' is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production. In other words, to *realize* the now necessary technical and cultural changes would require abandonment of what Marx called value as measure and what Hubbert called American folk-lore about the work ethic. Most employment now is merely pushing paper around. The actual work needed to keep a stable society running is a very small fraction of available manpower. Jim Devine wrote, I don't think that the validity of the bell curve is that important to the discussion of Hubbert's peak. His basic point -- or rather, that of his followers -- is the same as that of David Ricardo Thomas Malthus: long-term diminishing returns in the supplies of natural resources leads to increasing misery and/or conflict. Of course, as with Ricardo Malths, that ignores such matters as technical change (improvements in the efficiency of oil use, etc.) Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Hubbert's peak
Carrol Cox wrote, What needs to be debated is the views of those involved in the debate, not an antiquarian issue about some particular person not involved in the debate. Hear! Hear! Thank you for saying it, Carrol. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Mike Davis on Hubbert's Peak
sartesian wrote: Anybody interested in knowing just how flexible and elastic the speculations about peaks really are would do well to read the original peakist himself, the petroleum Malthus, M. King Hubbert. Take a look at http://www.hubbertpeak.com/hubbert/nehring.pdf and you will read the King predicting a peak in the non-communist world's oil production in the early to mid 1980s, etc. etc. etc. Didn't exactly happen that way, now did it? What I read on page iv of the report is a disclaimer that says Hubbert was one of several people who reviewed the technical memorandum but did not necessarily approve, disapprove or endorse this report. How is that the King predicting a peak? Anywhoo... the report gives a high end estimate for 2000 of 60 mbd for non-Communist world oil production. So, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, world oil production averaged 79 million barrels a day in 2003. Subtract about 18 million barrels a day for Eastern Europe, China and North Korea and that leaves 61 mbds for the non-Communist (as of 1980) world. So where's the great come uppance here, or am I missing something? All sniping at unwarranted snickering aside, my opinion is that Hubbert perhaps either misunderstood his own curve or deliberately obfuscated what it is really about. It's not primarily about just the physical quantity of crude in the ground -- although he seems to leave that impression. It's about the _relationship_ between the financially-dictated growth of the economy and the physical constraints imposed by the finite quantity of resources and also by the finite limits of technological improvement. Where Hubbert started out from is, I think, better revealed in his graph labeled Figure 1 in his 1936 article for Technocracy on Man-Hours and Distribution. That graph is titled Theoretical curves showing relation between production, man-hours per unit, and total man-hours, for U.S. (see: http://www.technocracy.org/pamphlets/man-hours-distribution.html). Undeniably, there is something fetishistic and reifying about Hubbert's and his acolytes' attachment to his curve -- sort of like a one-shot Kondratieff wave. But I think that can be attributed to the difficulty in distinguishing between the image and an explanation. It's a bit like explaining sheet music. To someone accustomed to graphing statistics, the relationships shown in the graph are almost self-explanatory. Any attempt at verbal elaboration, though, teeters between truism and hubris. The rub is that what Hubbert and his curve were up against was and still is folklore -- the hoary folklore of the work ethic and compound interest. Hubbert's curve simply says if you believe in one then you can't believe in the other or you can't have your cake and eat it too. American free enterprise folklore *insists* that you *must* believe in both simultaneously. Most people do and they are utterly baffled the moment you try to show in any way that the two are irreconcilable. I guess you just keep dumbing down your explanations with ever more 'concrete' examples until suddenly one day your dogma is written in stone. Snicker all you want at King Hubbert's small incoherencies. After all, the folks in the Hummers couldn't care less even if Hubbert successfully predicted fifty years in advance the exact date, hour and minute that world oil production will (or already did?) peak. As far as I'm concerned, world oil production has peaked when the U.S. has to have 130,000 troops occupying Iraq and Saudi Arabia has 30,000 guards protecting its oilfields and still its not enough to secure the supply. Doug Henwood wrote, Wow, those are some spectacularly wrong projections. Which ones specifically? And WHO made them? Someday we may run out of oil, but I suspect we'll choke ourselves or ruin the climate completely before we do. That's a reassuring thought. But actually, Doug, ruining the climate and choking ourselves are, effectively, ways to run out of oil. One also runs out of oil when one expends the better part of the productivity gains won from the use of energy in military action to secure the supply. You could call it robbing Peter to pay Paul. Conceivably, it might also be feasible to boost oil production by blasting it out of the ground with low-yield nuclear devices. The contaminated crude might make us glow in the dark but at least we wouldn't run out. Tom Walker
Re: Mike Davis on Hubbert's Peak
sartesian wrote: I believe it is important, essential really, that we not be stampeded into supporting, reproducing, endorsing scarcity theorizing for several reasons, first of which is that there is little data to support the grand theories of peak and depletion. Second of which is that scarcity is an ideology deployed to curb the unsupportable, as Hubbert would have called it, demands of an unsustainable population, i.e human welfare. There is little data to support any grand theories one way or the other. Either that or there is data that can be marshalled to support whatever one wishes to believe. I say this as an expert witness whose job it is to marshall data for arbitrations. The other side is always able to marshall its data that emphatically and unequivocally backs its case. Sometimes you have to crawl deep inside the so-called data to know whether it does or not. In the case of resource depletion, only data after the fact might be decisive but even that could be pooh-poohed as failing to take into account the as-yet unknown. Scarcity is hardly the problem. The problem is learning to live responsibly with abundance. We haven't learned to do that yet and unless we do the population is unsupportable because most of it is already not being supported while a tiny fraction of it is being gorged. Scarcity or no scarcity, non-renewable resources *are* finite. That's why they're called non-renewable. Or do you consider Bill Rees and Mathis Wackernagel hopelessly Malthusian, too. Not being myself versed in the collected works of M. King Hubbert, it's conceivable that your image of him as a raving Malthusian has some basis in something he wrote. I will admit I've encountered followers of Hubbert who give off an unmistakable whiff of Malthusianism. There is also, however a humanistic side to Hubbert that is incompatible with strict Malthusianism. So while not a stampeding endorser of Hubbert, I find some of what he has to say intriguing and useful. Some, I find awkward and nerdish. You seem to have an axe to grind against either the man or his epigones. I suppose working backwards from Kim Sung Il, I might disown Marx. You put curb, unsupportable and unsustainable in quotation marks and couple them with the phrase as Hubbert would have called it. Are you then paraphrasing something you project Hubbert would have said but never actually said? Or are you constructing a phrase out of separate words that Hubbert actually used? One needs to know what deep design lies behind such a peculiar and radically ungrammatical construction. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Is the American work ethic ruining our sex lives?
I've got the stats... but first, a quote from an old book: You promote the guy who takes his problem home with him. So wrote William Whyte in his 1956 book, _The Organization Man_. Harold Rosenberg expanded on that in a review, observing that for the commercialized intellecual: You hire the guy who takes his problem to bed with him. Two momentous demographic changes have taken place in the U.S. workplace since Whyte and Rosenberg commented. The participation of women in paid work has risen dramatically as has the academic credentialization of employees. There are other momentous changes but those are the two I'm looking at. From 1969 data, it is obvious that both gender and years of schooling are highly correlated with weekly hours of work. For the employed population, men worked longer hours, women worked shorter hours and the hours of work increased with years of schooling completed. Jumping ahead 35 years to 2004, what do we find with the hours of work? For the population as a whole, there was remarkably little change in the percentages in each time slot (1 to 5 hours, 6 to10 hours, etc.). Broken down by sex, there were changes in the distributions that when added together virtually offset each other. So the total gives a picture of DEAD CALM over a 35 year period (I also included 1987 as a midpoint). In my opinion, it's the dog that didn't bark. What I mean by this is that if the weekly hours actually worked were economically motived by the requirements of the production process there would likely have been a substantial change in the overall distribution. Instead, their very immobility suggests that they function more like a notational system for a position-holding hierarchy, i.e., promotion follows from conspicuous consumption of hours at the office. What does this have to do with sex? I'll answer that if someone can just explain to me what such time serving has to do with the work ethic. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Is the American work ethic ruining our sex lives?
Just a secondary citation. Harold Rosenberg quotes Whyte in _The Tradition of the New_, 1959, University of Chicago Press, p. 281. H.R. doesn't give the exact ref. Michael Perelman asked: this is wonderful. Do you have an exact ref? You promote the guy who takes his problem home with him. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Background to Berg Beheading
Ken Hanly wrote, Quite a bit of the stuff is speculation by conspiracy buffs The family firm of beheaded American Nick Berg, was named by a conservative website in a list of 'enemies' of the Iraq occupation. There is indeed speculation in the article Ken posted a link to and it is unfortunate because in this case the facts literally speak for themselves. I wouldn't call Free Republic a conservative website. It is a viciously racist forum whose participants routinely call for genocide against Muslims and/or Arabs. I have prepared a 100% speculation-free account of the Free Republic/Nick Berg matter. Internet Hate Group Targeted Michael S. Berg, Company by the Sandwichman Two weeks before Nicolaus Berg was allegedly picked up by Iraqi police, a right-wing hate group calling itself Free Republic published on the internet a hit list of enemies (http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1092851/posts) with the avowed purpose of harassing and harming individuals on the list. The list was copied from an online petition supporting a March 20, 2004 demonstration sponsored by the anti-war group ANSWER. It included the name of Michael S. Berg and listed his affiliation as Prometheus Methods Tower Services, Inc. Tactics discussed by the right-wingers included circulating the names to employers, the FBI and the military in anticipation of causing them serious grief. One participant stated, I sure do hope to see a round of hangings soon. The larger Free Republic site abounds with apocalyptic imagery, frequent calls for genocide against Muslims and Arabs and expressions of adoration for US President George W. Bush. Here you are, FReepers. wrote 'doug from upland,' the instigator of the enemies list, , Here is the enemy. Working in conjunction with A.N.S.W.E.R., they have given us their names. How about this one --- Jameel Rashid, U.S. Coast Guard, Portsmouth, VA. Well, sailor. I guess it is time for me to call your commanding officer and see what he thinks about this. The discussion topic is identified on the site by the keywords: APPEASENIKS; DAMNCOMMIES; ENEMYWITHIN; LEFTISTS; PEACENIKS; RATS; SCUMBAGS; TRAITORS; TREASONOUSSCUM; USEFULIDIOTS; WARONTERROR Less [sic] we forget, replied 'bmwcycle,' Everyone send this to Rush, Sean, Fox, and everyone you can e-mail this list. Don't stop until everyone has a copy. The tone of discussion on the topic, which initially continued from March 7 to March 12 2004, may be summarized by the following comments: The poor moron is not going to know what hit him. 2000 piles of puke on the floor, representing the who's who of the world of stench. Ah, too bad we don't have some pictures so we could make up a rogues gallery of some of the individuals. Turn on the full volume idiot alert with red strob [sic] light. This is priceless --- I only wish this putz worked for me. I can assure you, he would rue the day his mother delivered him. Discussion on the list had played itself out by March 12, totalling 269 messages. Then on May 11 it resumed with the message, The guy who was beheaded was on this list. He was also arrested by Iraqi police and held in an Iraqi prison for a few weeks before he was kidnapped. I think they treated him better in the prison than the kidnappers did. This was followed by a correction, Michael S. Berg, Teacher, Prometheus Methods Tower Service, Inc., I believe this is the father of Nick Berg - I wonder what he thinks about his Muslim buddies now... One respondent to the message, 'He won't blame the Islamofascist bastards. He will blame the president'... and he has, expressed a desire to spit in the face of Michael Berg. It was deleted by the list moderator, (comment #275). Another relayed the information that the FReeper enemies list was being mentioned in connection with Nick Berg's murder. Did you know FreeRepublic is being partially blamed for Nick Bergs beheading? Asked one participant. A subsequent message sought to disown any possible culpability, FR just copied a list. Whoever put the list together in the first place is in the mix too. Two messages, struck by conscience or public relations savvy quickly offered pro-forma, if mixed expressions of magnanimity: My heart and prayers go out to the Berg family, and Mr. Berg's friends. My prayers also go, daily, to our fightig [sic] men and women, and that God will strike our enemies senseless. My prayers are for the Berg family and friends also. Regardless of their politics they are parents and I have sympathy for what they must be going through. It has to be heart wrenching. The last comment on the list, as of 4:10 am on May 13 complained, Now we at Freerepublic are responsible for Berg's death-because of this thread? But perhaps the answer to that had already appeared, two messages earlier with presumably unintentional irony: When is the last time you saw someone on the political right do property damage or deliberately injure someone? When do we call for the death of anyone other than our
Re: Did Bush Sacrifice Nick Berg?
On March 7, 2004 an a href=http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1092851/posts;enemies list/a composed of signatories to an anti-war petition was posted on the Free Republic website. The introductory and subsequent comments on that list suggest that the purpose of the posting was to encourage people to harrass the individuals on the list and to circulate their names to agencies and individuals that might take action against them. Nicolaus Berg's father, Michael Berg was on that list and he named Prometheus Methods Tower Service, Inc. as an affiliation. According to his family on March 24, 2004 -- approximately two weeks after publication of the enemies list on the Free Republic website -- Nicolaus Berg was detained by Iraqi police who handed him over to US forces, he was then held until April 6 when he was released, the day after his family had filed a lawsuit in Philadelphia federal court. Nicolaus Berg was not heard from again after April 9. Tom Walker
Re: imperalist booty
Julio Huato wrote, Considered as wealth, the colonial booty was already consumed, directly or productively. Or it was wasted. Therefore, its value is gone to never return. The value of wealth, productive or not, the value of any non-directly-human input of production, once consumed, is gone as well. If a society is to be reproduced, then entirely new value needs to replace it, because the only way value can be preserved beyond its existing use value form is to be replaced altogether by newly created value. We need to be careful about three distinct relationships here that tend to get confused one for another: wealth, value and capital. Perhaps the confusion results from the fact that they can be readily exchanged for each other. Perhaps capitalism results from the fact that they can be confused with one another. Or, to say the same a bit differently, capital is able to continually overcome an otherwise operative tendency for a fall in the rate of profit because of shape shifting between wealth, value and capital. What you say is correct with respect to value. Value doesn't continue to exist beyond its consumption either directly or productively. Capital, however, describes a relationship that lays claim to a portion of value as it's being produced -- in theory the difference between the cost of reproducing labour power and the value produced by the expenditure of that labour power REGARDLESS OF THE COST OF THE OTHER INPUTS. That's a political claim and doesn't depend on any physical process of production. Capital itself _need not be productive at all_ but may be fictitious. Wealth, I would like to say, is disposable time and nothing more. If that sounds abrupt and enigmatic, the reference is to remarks by the old man (another year older, even) in the Grundrisse and ultimately to the anonymous 1821 pamphlet by Dilke. Money doesn't grow on trees but wealth can and does. Wealth falls from the sky like rain and shines down on us from the heavens. But an immense quantity of wealth can also be destroyed in the pursuit of a insignificant amount of value. That would appear to be the stage of capitalism that we're currently in: the one in which, overall, the expansion of value needed to service the accumulation of capital requires the destruction of more wealth than it creates. Unless we can sort the three out, we're seriously fucked. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: imperalist booty
In reply to Julio Huato, The reference is to page 706 of the English translation, Vintage Books. At some level the distinctions between wealth, value and capital may be straightforward but they're not so at the margins. Marx, as I read the passage, quotes approvingly of the notion that real wealth is disposable time *outside that needed in direct production*. Therefore only a portion of value -- that which is directly consumed -- would count as wealth. And use value includes more than value. The blackberry I pluck from the roadside bramble and eat has use value even though I would hardly describe my activities of plucking, chewing and swallowing as labor. But I would add that wealth is more than the stock of use values in that it also includes _potential_ use values, which may only be potential in some remote and unknown way and thus, for all we know, unlikely to be used. Maybe I'm splitting hairs by distinguishing between recognized use values and potentialities that we don't and may never know about, I don't think so. It's true that value valorizes itself by by repeated exploitation of fresh labor. But the amount of that value in turn is established in retrospect by the revenues it receives. Let's say I own a portfolio of securities with a value of $10,000 that pays dividends of $1,000 a year. What happens to the value of my porfolio if the dividend is increased to $2,000 a year? It most likely goes up. Although I may be exploiting labour more intensively in the dividend, have I added any exploited labour to my principal? No. So where did the extra value of my principal come from? Strictly speaking , it's fictitious. I might even go further and say that, viewed in retrospect, all capital thus becomes fictitious to the extent that even the value of physical assets is nothing in the absence of the continuing revenues. But that is viewed in retrospect. We don't just appear at that retrospective point from thin air. We have to get there first. I won't argue for or against Louis Proyect's views on plunder, although I can imagine that the magnitude of that plunder is immense. Especially in terms of real wealth, as distinct from the slag heaps of highly acclaimed values spewed out by capitalist industry. I would agree that imperialism and abuse neither arise from the nature of capital nor are the essential characteristics of it. But they are essential characteristics of the actual history we have lived with capital. That says something, even if it is only that capitalism thrives in vile conditions. The state both enforces rules and violates them. Sovereignty, after all, is a claim to a monopoly of violence, not its abolition. Are you saying that the state that sends Martha Stewart to jail for lying about her stock transactions is a different state from the one that lies about the reasons for going to war and then, when the lies cease to be operative, blythely and with impunity produces a new set of lies? I would say they are just two faces of the same state. I leave Louis Brandeis to speak for himself. If he still can. But I don't understand why the tendency of the average profit rate is relevant to this discussion. Because if the accumulation of capital worked in a storybook step-by-step fashion the rising proportion of capital to labour would cause the revenue per unit of capital to decline: simplistically, revenue would increase arithmetically while capital would increase geometrically. I dread even mentioning this caricature for fear that it will come back to haunt me someday as something that I've said actually happens. It doesn't happen and in very general terms it doesn't (it couldn't) precisely because wealth we didn't know existed can become use-values and value can evaporate or be mysteriously back-formed from revenue, etc. But as a whole, capital must be productive or perish. Depends on what you mean by productive and perish. State owned enterprises in the Soviet Union regularly met their production targets by producing unsaleable goods for the warehouse and consuming inputs with higher value that their outputs. That's what is happening here (in terms of wealth if not in terms of value). But exactly who and what perished when the USSR collapsed? What will perish when the current stage of capitalist subtraction -- not of value but of real wealth -- finally reaches its limit? Will it be capital per se or simply the last shred of bourgeois legitimacy and legality formerly associated with capitalism (re: the Brandeis quote). Wealth on the other hand has to be painstakingly produced. Yes. But not necessarily by the expenditure of labour power. Again, see Grundrisse e.g., pp. 704-709. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: The new Iraqi Flag ( imperialist booty)
Doug Henwood wrote, I keep wanting to see some rigorous proof that the First World is rich primarily at the expense of the Third, which is something I hear people assert pretty often. I'm open to the argument, if someone wants to make it. Depends first on what you mean by rich and poor. Political economy upholds the amount of revenues that are or could be raised. Dilke argued wealth was disposable time and nothing more. I suppose that translates into per capita GDP versus per capita GPI. But second I think it is a mistake to assume that enrichment and/or impoverish represent or are represented by a transfer of funds from one place to another. A rich country's monopolization of resources, markets etc. can effectively deny access to those resources or markets even with no money changing hands. So how do we measure the absence of what might have been? It seems to me that it is not so much the poor who enrich the rich as the rich who impoverish the poor. And not always by taking away something that the poor formerly have. Sometimes by giving or selling them something that they were better off without: neo-colonial regimes, ill-conceived development projects, armaments, infant formula etc. You can do a lot of damage for relatively little profit. Because it is the first world that primarily does the valuing the dollar value of the transactions may be much smaller than their impacts. Would Coke's revenues exceed the royalties paid to all third world musicians? Maybe that question encapsulates too many of the qualitative imponderables. But whoops, there I go making those moral judgements that the free market prohibits me from making. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: imperalist booty
Doug Henwood, I don't doubt that about the past; my query is about the present. Of course, Brenner disagrees, but I don't want to go near that one on this list. But capital is all about the past: dead labour. Those who appropriated the most dead labour in the past are entitled to appropriate more dead labour, compounded, in the future. Doesn't matter if you appropriated it there then and here now. Joan Robinson quipped the only thing worse than having one's labour power exploited is not having one's labour power exploited. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Bush/Greenspan tax increase?
Gene Coyle wrote: The notion of raising the retirement age for full Social Security benefits is popular in conservative circles. Shouldn't it be described as a tax increase? It's actually a tax cut, Gene. You see, wages are a tax on the revenue of the real creaters of wealth -- the rich. Social Security benefits are simply deferred wages. Therefore, the fewer SS benefits workers receive and the longer they have to work for those benefits, the more of their own hard-earned income the wealthy get to keep. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: utopianism
from the domination of capital. Otherwise the disposable time confronts us as empty time to be filled up with the products of commercialized culture. Seen in that light, the superfluous *remains* a condition -- question of life or death -- for the necessary, whether under capitalism or any realizable alternative. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Working like dogs (was Job flight)
d-squared wrote: but one argument that I always think ought to get more traction is that capitalism has singularly failed to shorten the working day. A lot of people intuitively realise that there is something wrong here; we were promised robot slaves and unlimited leisure time in the comic books, and now the space age is here and we're still working like dogs. Broken record, here. Yes, it's uncanny how the argument doesn't get more traction. I mentioned yesterday in a post on this thread that a reduction of U.S. annual hours to approximately European standards could be expected to generate (or preserve) around 10 million jobs, the same number John Kerry claims (with less supporting argument) his economic policies would produce in four years. Kerry's 10 million estimate comes from a memo from Lawrence Katz who projects that number from the lowering of the unemployment rate to 4.1%. Sounds to me like a tautology: if the unemployment rate drops while the labour force grows, jobs will be created. That's right up there with Calvin Coolidge's When a great many people are unable to find work, unemployment results. That same Katz commented some years ago on a Brookings Institute paper about hours reduction as work sharing. He made a number of sensible background points but his main point and emphasis was utterly unsubstantiated. He even produced a pseudo-algebraic 'model' (the best case scenario for advocates of work-sharing) that only pertains if one assumes that the given hours of work are optimal for maximizing output, a condition that has been clearly demonstrated to be contrary to theory. And, of course, he just had to frame his discussion with a recital of the lump-of-output fallacy, Richard Layard's lame attempt to lend greater terminological precision to the utterly fraudulent claim of a lump-of-labour fallacy. The bottom line for Katz was the conclusion that there are a number of good reasons to believe that mandated work-sharing is unlikely to produce much of a reduction in unemployment. One of those good reasons being his theoretically bankrupt model and the other being the allegedly fallacious assumption implicit in arguments for work-sharing. That, I'm afraid is what passes for the conventional wisdom in economics on the hours of labour. Tom Walker
Re: utopianism
Jim Devine wrote, I see nothing wrong with utopian dreaming, as long as it's not seen as a matter of thinking up blueprints that _must_ be imposed. Just about everything I lay my hands on these days has the word Utopia in it. Chapman (1909): It occurred to me after a cursory examination of some recent examples of that remarkable modern crop of Utopias and anticipations which apparently are appealing to an extensive public. Dilke (1821): Even in these Utopian speculations the great land-holder should possibly be excepted; a rent, equal to the expense on importation, being alsways secured to him. Dahlberg (1927): Utopia through Capitalism. The irony, it seems to me, is that ALL theoretical abstractions about society and economy are essentially Utopian, no matter how realistic or materialistic they may aspire to be. Even dystopias are Utopian, although not eutopian. I'm drawn to this reflection first by the frankness of Dilke's description of his treatise as Utopian speculations and its contrast with Chapman's chaste disclaimer, If only these 'new worlds' represented what existed somewhere among human beings with passions and infirmities like our own, how much more instructive they would be! Could it not be, though, that the more 'realistic' a Utopia purports to be, the more beguiling it is as a dogmatic blueprint that must be imposed? The most beguiling Utopia would be precisely the one that elevates and enshrines those passions and infirmities like our own. Like selfishness and greed, for instance. Clearly the world in which the innocent, well-meaning, enlightened, prosperty-bringing USA is threatened by evil enemies is a Utopia even though it is presented nightly on the newscasts as an actual place. But then so too is the world in which US imperialism dominates the globe with its military might -- even if one happens to think it is a descriptively more accurate one. What I am having some difficulty formulating a response to is the seemingly spontaneous, instantaneous 'ability' of people to 'see through' and dismiss positive visions of change as frivolously utopian and simultaneously to recite a stale litany of non-factual, not even theoretically plausible articles of faith about the way it really is, always has been and always will be. You know, the way that higher wages destroy jobs, longer hours mean greater productivity and 'flexibility' or competition lowers prices and improves quality.
Re: Job flight
While there are no hard local numbers, about 300,000 jobs nationwide have been lost since 2000, according to Forrester Research Inc. Well, while there are no hard numbers, about 10,000,000 jobs have been lost in the U.S. due to excessive hours of work (compared to Europe). Candidate Kerry says he'll create 10,000,000 jobs over 4 years by reducing corporate tax rates. Well, the same number of jobs could be created over the same time frame -- perhaps shorter -- by phasing in a reduction in the average annual hours of work from around 1815 to a more leisurely 1550. The rule of thumb is that about half of a reduction in hours per worker translates into job creation and about half into productivity gains. Imagine, though, the torrent of indignation, outrage and disdain that would issue forth from editorial pages and mainstream economist if a Democratic candidate had the temerity to make such a ridiculous, fallacious and utterly frivolous proposal*. The fact that the editorialists and mainstreamers wouldn't know what they were talking about is beside the point -- their ignorance would be unanimous and their unanimity would surmount all uncertainty. *Not to mention unprecedented. GOP 1932: We favor the principle of the shorter work week and the shorter work day with its application to Government as well as to private employment, as rapidly and as constructively as conditions will warrant. DEM 1932: We advocate the spread of employment by a substantial reduction in the hours of labor, the encouragement of the shorter week by applying that principle in government service, Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Job flight contest $$ (was terrorism futures market)
Gene Coyle wrote: Thinking about job flight? Here's your reward. Thanks, Gene. I'll enter. I won the last essay contest I entered that was announced on Pen-L: Robin (terrorism futures market) Hanson's Has Privatization gone far enough? Since there are eight prizes in this one, a $5,000 show should be a dead cinch for the Sandwichman! the title 'Import workers or export jobs?' shouldn't hurt because one of the standard replies to fears that immigrants will take away jobs has been the 'lump-of-labor fallacy' rebuttal that there is not a fixed amount of work. The Economist has, over the past decade been the leading propagandist against the lump-of-labor fallacy, so they should be especially impressed when I begin my essay with the words: There is most definitely *not* a fixed amount of work to be done... Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: 'human capital
I would like to draw your attention to the discussion on pages 32 to 35 of the 1821 pamphlet, The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties (described by Engels as the most advanced outpost of a whole group of writings of the 1820s...). The author constructs a rude guess as to how far the exactions of capital extend. He does so by subtracting, from the incomes of several classes of people, the average annual wages of a common labourer. Income above that standard he reckons as being interest on capital, for even the high wages of mechanics and other artizans, inasmuch as it exceeds this, is interest of capital; capital expended in their apprenticeship, in indentures, premium, food, or clothing, or loss of time. If you follow the entire analysis, it should be clear that not all of this 'human capital' would be 'productive'. In fact, without singling out Bishops, Barristers or Persons educating youths in Universities and Chief Schools, a large quantity of it may be presumed to be fictitious capital, corresponding to the relatively large proportions of fictitious capital in general that is analyzed previously in the pamphlet. The pamplet is available in the microfilm Goldsmiths' Kress Library of Economic Literature. I am in the process of transcribing it to an electronic file. If anyone would like me to send them a copy (in MS Word), I can be reached at timework at telus.net. BTW, the title of the pamphlet goes on to describe it as Deduced from Principles of Political Economy in a Letter to Lord John Russell. It occurs to me that it might have been appropriate to have referred to it as deduced from principles of Political Justice, rather than economy, with the substitute term signifying the author's commitment to the ideas of William Godwin, as expressed in his Enquiry Concerning Political Justice, and its Influence on General Virtue and Happiness. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: What is this thing called love?
The knight sets forth... 1. In Mimesis in the Origins of Bourgeois Culture (Theory and Society, Autumn, 1977) Sharon Zukin suggested that the Protestant ethic, to which Weber attributed the spirit of capitalism -- Benjamin Franklin's moralizing about hard work and thrift -- the cult of the self-made man -- may have been ultimately based on bourgeois mimesis and adaptation of the conventions of aristocratic courtly romance. 2. see also Susan Buck-Morss: The Flaneur, the Sandwichman and the Whore (New German Critique, Fall, 1986) The Flaneur takes the concept of being-for-sale itself for a walk... his last incarnation is as sandwichman. ...the 'keep smiling' on the job market adopts the behavior of the whore who, on the love market, picks up someone with a smile. With regard to the de La Rochefoucauld maxim I posted earlier, I would interpret les femmes as only conventionally referring to women but metaphorically referring more broadly to those who love. And les premires passions are, in my opinion, only mentioned to provide a spectral counterpoint to les autres. The maxim thus boils down to something like those who love are in love with love. les femmes and les premires passions give the maxim character and animate it, just as l'amant does for l'amour. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: What is this thing called love?
Porter is prety cold-eyed about love, which was my point to Joanna. He's the fella that wrote Love For Sale, among others. Electric eels, I might add, do it Though it shocks 'em I know Why ask if shad do it Waiter, bring me shadroe Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: What is this thing called love?
Joanna: Why not simply say that human relationships are bound by love. After all, contracts are always conditional, whereas love is not. Dans les premires passions les femmes aiment l'amant, et dans les autres elles aiment l'amour. -- Franois, duc de La Rochefoucauld Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Rifkin Redux
http://www.guardian.co.uk/recession/story/0,7369,1159787,00.html Herein lies the conundrum. If dramatic advances in productivity can replace more and more human labour, resulting in more workers being let go from the workforce, where will the consumer demand come from to buy all the potential new products and services? We are being forced to face up to an inherent contradiction at the heart of our market economy that has been present since the very beginning, but is only now becoming irreconcilable. Greatly increased productivity has been at the expense of more workers being marginalised into part-time employment or given their pink slips. A shrinking workforce, however, means diminished income, reduced consumer demand, and an economy unable to grow. This is the new structural reality that government and business leaders and so many economists are reluctant to acknowledge. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Love Affair Update
Michael, A few tips: KENNETH CHARLES BLAISDELL wrote a dissertation in 1984 on early 1950s car magazines. The abstract refers to America's love affair with the car. kcb at deltatechinc.com Also, in a footnote in a 1958 article on The Belief in Progress in Twentieth-Century America Clarke Chambers refers to a Max Lerner article in which Lerner commented upon the long love affair that Americans had carried on with the machine...(Journal of the History of Ideas: Vol. 19, No. 2, p.217) Max Lerner The Machine Explodes in Actions and Passions: Notes on the Multiple Revolutions of Our Time (New York, 1949) p. 19-20 Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Is Recovery Without Jobs Now the Norm?
From the LA Times: The jobless recovery, nearly 2 1/2 years old, has gone on too long to be called an anomaly or a blip, Zandi said. Even if the economy finds its way and creates jobs, he added, this strange time will be remembered as part of economic lore. If the past pattern of growth no longer holds, the implications are enormous. Regression to the mean. I suspect that the real anomaly was the low unemployment rate of 1999-2000 and the jobless recovery has been simply working off a backlog of what might be called fictitious employment. In other words, the goldilocks economy was a bleached blonde and now the mousy brown roots are growing out. On the surface, things now are not quite as bad as they look-- it's just that they were too good to be true then. Deep down, though, things are worse than they appear. What drove the jobs bubble was an unprecedented asset inflation, the residual of which remains embedded in house prices. Paradoxically, poor job growth may be the only thing sustaining the recovery. Here's why: rapid job growth and, more importantly, the consequent income growth would increase inflationary pressures leading to the raising of interest rates and, ultimately, the bursting of the housing bubble. The other paradox is that poor job growth is likely keeping the unemployment rate lower than it otherwise would be. A hiring boom would swell the labour force. Interesting times. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Friendly folks and U.S. taxpayers
It's very simple. Our people risked their lives. Friendly coalition folks risked their lives, and therefore the contracting is going to reflect that, and that's what the U.S. taxpayers expect, Ui said. Vino vendibili hedera non opus est. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Friendly folks and U.S. taxpayers
Michael Perelman wrote, This stance is conclusive proof that gov't contracts are pork, not transactions at arms length. The gov't is not usually that open about its dealings. Yes, indeed. It's about the loot. There's also a formidible subtext here about the weapons of mass destruction. That is to say, about the absence of weapons of mass destruction and the absence of any mention of that absence. Friendly coalition folks risked their lives... for what? Not for what the official cover story claimed. But we knew all along that the official cover story was a pretext. They said so themselves, sotto voce. So now, rather than finesse what should be an embarrassment, Bush elects to brazen it with the conqueror's swagger.
PK on the lump of labor fallacy
Workin' on it. Tom Walker 604 255 4812 Ian wrote: [cue to the Sandwichman] [New York Times] October 7, 2003 Lumps of Labor By PAUL KRUGMAN
Re: PK on the lump of labor fallacy
Dear Professor Krugman, The so-called 'lump of labor fallacy' you refer to in your column of October 7, 2003 is a crock (see my The 'lump-of-labor'case against work-sharing: populist fallacy or marginalist throwback? in _Working Time: International trends, theory and policy perspectives_, eds. Lonnie Golden and Deborah M. Figart, Routledge, 2000). A legend about the fallacy has indeed been passed down in introductory economics textbooks to generations of students, but that is about the full extent of its status as economic knowledge. The spurious claim that advocates of reduced work time routinely commit such a fallacy is responsible for more policy impasses than is any alleged belief in a fixed amount of work. As an advocate of shorter work time, I always found it puzzling that I was supposed to believe in a fixed amount of work -- a concept that didn't make much sense to me. So I did what any responsible scholar would do: I went to the sources. It wasn't easy. Textbooks that referred to the lump of labor fallacy didn't footnote the fallacy; they simply repeated it as well-known and self-evident. I was eventually lucky enough to find what appears to be the earliest usage through a full-text search in JSTOR and I discovered that the lump of labor fallacy wasn't exactly as represented in the textbooks. That early usage, by D.F. Schloss in 1892, was anecdotal rather than logical and, as the author remarked, had nothing to do with the length of the working day. Schloss was discussing workers' attitudes toward piecework. It was, I believe, only after the anti-Eight-hour-day activities of the National Association of Manufacturers in the early 1900s blurred the issue that Schloss's anecdotal and sarcastic remarks about piecework came to be viewed by textbook authors as some sort of 'well-established economic principle' regarding working time. Aside from its dubious genealogy, there are several things wrong with the lump of labor fallacy as a fallacy. First, no one has ever bothered to, nor could they, demonstrate (not just assert) that advocates of shorter work time either typically do or must necessarily assume that there is a fixed amount of work to be done. Without such a demonstration the charge of fallacy is simply a red herring. Second, the various explanations given by textbook authors for why the supposed fallacy is a fallacy do not jibe. There is something essential missing in each of these explanations, which perhaps explains why it is so necessary for the authors to ad lib. Finally, a 'fixed amount of work' is not a logical absurdity however unrealistic it may seem in light of empirical observation of past, long-term trends. Economists make unrealistic assumptions all the time and call them simplifying assumptions. And speaking of simplifying assumptions, one was made by J.R. Hicks in 1932 to facilitate his analysis of economic growth. That was his assumption that the given length of the working day was optimal. Hicks knew that his simplification was, in a sense, counter-theoretical because he understood and acknowledged the theory of the hours of labor as it had been presented by Sir Sydney Chapman in 1909. In fact, Hicks referred to Chapman's analysis as the classical statement of the theory of 'hours' in a free market. Of course, nowadays economists continue to make the same simplifying assumption without even realizing they are making an assumption, let alone that it runs counter to the established (but untaught) economic theory. They wouldn't think of asking what happens if they relaxed that unlikely, unacknowledged and wholly unconscious assumption. How pathetic. Economists remember and preach their ersatz lump-of-labor fallacy but have forgotten Chapman's genuine analysis of the hours of labor. Think of the arid circles policy debates must wander in if the single most worker-friendly region of economic policy intervention were ruled 'out of bounds' simply because economists refuse to critically examine a trivial bit of textbook lore. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
TimeWork Web deleted
It looks like vancouver community net has deleted timework web. I had requested that they terminate my email account there because it got too much spam. Apparently when they closed the email, they just deleted the entire timework user file including the web pages. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: affluenza?
Kenneth Campbell wrote: You cannot let people have time... Yet I can think of nothing I would treasure more. According to an anonymous author writing in a pamphlet published in 1821: After all their idle sophistry, there is, thank God! no means of adding to the wealth of a nation but by adding to the facilities of living: so that wealth is liberty -- liberty to seek recreation -- liberty to enjoy life -- liberty to improve the mind: it is disposable time, and nothing more. According to Engels, Marx rescued that pamphlet from oblivion because it inspired Marx's concept of surplus value. Marx mentioned the pamphlet in his Grundrisse (page 706 in the 1973 Vintage Books edition) and, in some detail, in his notes published as the Economic Manuscript of 1861-63 (page 388-91 in Volume 32 Marx Engels Collected Works). According to Michael Perelman, the author of the pamphlet was apparently Charles Wentworth Dilke. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Showtime docudrama - DC 9/11: Time of Crisis
Hmmm. Here's something new. For us furiners, the showtime URL Sabri gave is intercepted by a lockout page with the following text: We at Showtime Online express our apologies; however, these pages are intended for access only from within the United States. http://www.showtimeonline.com/movies/movies_product.cfm?titleid=119354 Only in America, you say? Pity. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: technical question: help, help, help
Michael, I'm getting 100s of virus emails a day plus a large number of undelivered mail notices for email I didn't send. None of it comes from my machine because it uses a pine mailer on a unix server that I access through telnet. So obviously my return address has been forged. I've also received virus emails from three addresses I recognized as pen-l subscribers. Apparently, some hacker or hacker-program has been forging pen-ler's addresses en mass. Fortunately, my work email address is unscathed. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
FT: Fun w/ pension accounting tricks
BACK PAGE - FIRST SECTION: US pensions sleight of hand is making investors nervous I'd like to see somebody's model of an economic recovery in which mortgage rates remain eternally low but rates of return on pension assets snap back smartly to late 1990s boom-time levels. The anti-gravity generator goes right over there, next to the perpetual motion drive belt. Presumably it runs on electricity. Cheap, clean and reliable. And if it doesn't work, blame it on the weather. Who could have predicted it would get hotter? Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: futures market military intelligence (was Economists for sale. Make big bucks)
Back in November '95, Michael Perelman posted an announcement to the Pen-L list of an essay prize on the topic Privatization: has it gone far enough? One of the organizers of the competition was Robin Hanson, also the originator of the Policy Analysis Market currently in the news. I remember because I won the $1,000 prize. Market analysis of potential events - Nanodot: http://nanodot.org/article.pl?sid=03/05/28/0658256 PEN-L:1349] Economists for sale. Make big bucks: http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/1995m11.b/msg00099.htm Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: No Googling quiz
You googled? But you didn't answer 2. and 3. Ian wrote: What, is Lieberman's staff lurking on Pen-L? Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: No Googling quiz
Ian wrote, No. Enron hearings iirc. That's two out of three. For the (partial) answer to number three, I'll defer to NYT columnist, Thomas Friedman's possibly hyperbolic reference: There are two superpowers in the world today in my opinion. Theres the United States and theres Moodys Bond Rating Service. The United States can destroy you by dropping bombs, and Moodys can destroy you by downgrading your bonds. And believe me, its not clear sometimes whos more powerful. For extra credit now (an open-ended question): what are activist groups/scholars/journalists doing to comprehend and contest the superpower influence of these private companies with government-conferred power? (Hint: 1. the answer is not nothing and 2. I don't know the answer. That's why I'm asking.) Original questions: They are private companies, but the enormous scope of their influence comes largely as a result of their government-conferred power. 1. Who said it? 2. What was the circumstances? 3. Which private companies was s/he referring to? Tom Walker 604 255 4812
No Googling quiz
They are private companies, but the enormous scope of their influence comes largely as a result of their government-conferred power. 1. Who said it? 2. What was the circumstances? 3. Which private companies was s/he referring to? NO GOOGLING! Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: intellectuals as intellectual property
Could Labor History now be considered *fictitious* capital? Aren't you glad that cows can't fly? Michael wrote, I got this from the H-Labor list. What interests me is the way that such work becomes transformed into property. From: Nelson N. Lichtenstein [EMAIL PROTECTED] From: Nelson Lichtenstein [EMAIL PROTECTED] Tom Walker 604 255 4812
The cog stripped bare by its bachelors, even
1. Downloading the Future of TV Advertising In April 2003, Honda U.K. debuted an extraordinary two-minute television advertisement called 'Cog.'... 2. Apropos of 'Readymades' - Marcel Duchamp In 1913 I had the happy idea to fasten a bicycle wheel to a kitchen stool and watch it turn Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Saving the advertising industry in a fractured media-verse? Biz 2.0
Kenneth Campbell wrote: Rather, those spouting conventional wisdoms are able to be more easily understood in the small space of time they will get on camera. Or, to cite the Far-Sighted Manifesto by Francis Picabia, worn by Andr Breton on a sandwichboard: POUR QUE VOUS AIMIEZ QUELQUE CHOSE IL FAUT QUE VOUS L'AYEZ VU et ENTENDU DEPUIS LONGTEMPS tas D'IDIOTS Tom Walker 604 255 4812
interesting quote
I'm sure he must have meant to say ... mis-spent they youth in *masturbating* the intricacies... Paul Samuelson sneers at the sterile verbalizations by which economists have tended to describe fertility decisions in terms of the jargon of indifference curves, thereby tending to intimidate non-economists who have not mis-spent their youth in mastering the intricacies of modern utility theory.' Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Saving the advertising industry in a fractured media-verse? Biz 2.0
Science World here in Vancouver runs a continuous loop of the 1987 Fischli and Weiss film The Way Things Go. The borrowings of the Honda ad from the film are obvious to anyone who has viewed both. What is also obvious -- and ominous -- are the non-borrowings: the autotalitarian elision of the gritty, angst-ridden edge that the original had. There is a definite sense of futility, debris and impending 'technological' lurching out of control to the original that perhaps, come to think of it, is more appropriate for a car ad than the sanitized white-painted walls and polished hardwood floors of the Honda re-make. Interesting that the Biz 2.0 article fails to mention the Fischli and Weiss film. It's not as if the resemblance is a secret. For another take on The Way Things Go, here's an excerpt from Arthur Danto: http://www.postmedia.net/999/fischweiss1.htm Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Saving the advertising industry in a fractured media-verse? Biz 2.0
Or, digging deeper into the ruins... Homage to New York 1960 http://www.artmuseum.net/w2vr/archives/Kluver/00_Homage.html I asked Jean what I could do for him. Jean explained that he wanted to make a machine that destroyed itself and that he needed bicycle wheels... ...It was all over in 27 minutes. The audience applauded and descended on the wreckage for souvenirs. Jean called the event Homage to New York. Prophecy?
Re: Saving the advertising industry in a fractured media-verse? Biz 2.0
Carrol Cox wrote, This high and higher efforts that Danto speaks of, leading to chaos, must owe something to Laurel and Hardy as well. And of course Chaplin's Modern Times. In fact to much of the great slapstick, 1915-1940. Yes, also constructivism and dada. As Walter Benjamin wrote: Modernity; the time of hell. The punishments of hell are always the newest thing going in this domain. What is at issue is not that the same thing happens over and over (much less is it a question here of eternal return), but rather that the face of the world, the colossal head, precisely in what is newest never alters -- that this newest remains, in every respect, the same
Re: Susceptibility to Marx
From each according to his need... I believe that Marx got it from Louis Blanc who adapted a slightly different notion from the St. Simonists. The basic idea is biblical. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Falsifiability and the law of value
A cynic is one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. -- Oscar Wilde The law of value -- whether right or wrong, scientific or not -- is only one side of the story, on the other side of which is to be found the dynamic, might I say anti-capitalist, kernal. The other side is that value is not real wealth. From the perspective of real wealth, the transformation problem is trivial. The basic statement of the problem -- from an anonymous 1821 pamphlet, _The Source and Remedy of the National Difficulties, Deduced from Principles of Political Economy, in a Letter to Lord John Russell._ -- could probably better be understood as allegorical rather than 'scientific' in either intent or execution. Keynes said he would rather be vaguely right than precisely wrong. The non-identity of value and real wealth is vaguely right whether or not value is precisely determined by the quantity of socially necessary labour time embodied in the sum of commodities. One might add that since the qualifier of social necessity is itself vague and hugely transitory, there could be no way of verifying the proposition empirically. The world or social formation in which socially necessary labour time determines value has never empirically existed. Nor is there a frictionless plane that I am aware of. Have I overlooked one? If I have, please send me the coordinates for it so I can build my perpetual motion machine. I will call it Capital. So what is real wealth? That is the big problem. According to said pamphlet, cited with enthusiastic approval by Marx, real wealth is disposable time and nothing more. That is to say, real wealth is free time. Period. So what, then, is free time? Is it free time when an unemployed worker is looking for work? Is it free time when an exhausted employee is slumped in front of a television set staring at commercial messages? Is it free time when a commuter is inching along in rush hour traffic? In other words, does free time indicate merely the absense of a direct wage and consequently a vacation from the realm of production and accumulation of surplus value. On the contrary, one would suppose that such colonized time is less free even than waged labour time. Is there anyone out there who agrees that the problem of free time is _the problem_ and the solution of transformation equations offers no solution to the problem of free time? How far my own opinions will be conclusive with your Lordship's, I dare not hazard a conjecture; but as many of them are uncommon, they may, as Hume says, 'repay some cost to understand them.' But, my Lord, if they are true, they have most important consequences; I therefore earnestly intreat you not to reject them without a patient and attentive examination. -- anonymous Post-Ricardian pamphleteer http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/remedy.htm Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Weber the 'Euroslackers'
Yes, total rubbish. To add insult to injury, Ferguson mentions vindication of Weber several times. To judge from the article, Ferguson either never read Weber's book or read it so long ago as an undergrad that he has only the vague idea that it had something to do with the work ethic and protestantism. Weber's concluding quotation from Goethe (I believe it was) is apt: Specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart; this nullity imagines that it has attained a level of civilization never before achieved. Ian Murray wrote, [lord what rot] [NYTimes] June 8, 2003 Why America Outpaces Europe (Clue: The God Factor) By NIALL FERGUSON Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: American dream (phantasmagoria)
Mark Tran in the Guardian: The gloomy economic data reflect a fundamental reality that the markets seem to be overlooking as they follow the headlines from the war. The US is still struggling to shake off the huge investment boom of the 1990s as corporations loaded themselves up with large amounts of debt. Working out those excesses is taking longer than most people thought. Even if US forces march into Baghdad in the next few days (we'll leave the complicated aftermath for now), the nasty economic facts of life will reassert themselves. Don't be surprised if the markets start sinking again. Me: The scenario brings to minds the gamblers' strategy of the martingale -- doubling the stakes after each loss in the erroneous belief that the laws of probability 'have memory' and in blissful ignorance of exponential progression. Taking Baghdad will play a card so high and wild that [the U.S]. will never have to play another. Walter Benjamin cites Alfred Marquiset, iJeux et joueurs d'autrefois/i., 1789-1837: Possesed of nothing more than a perfect knowledge of martingales, series, and intermittences, they sat in the gambling dens from opening to closing time and ended their evening in those grottoes of bouillotte [a pre-curser to poker] nick-named Baural houses. Always on the lookout for novices and beginners..., these bizarre professors dispensed advice, talked over past throws of the dice, predicted the throws to come, and played for others. In the event of losses, they had only to curse the toss or put the blame on a drawn game, on chance, on the date of the month if it was the thirteenth, on the day of the week if it was Friday. In the event of a win, they would draw their dividend, over and above what they skimmed during their management of the funds -- a transaction which was known as 'feeding the magpie.' These operators divided into different classes: the aristocrats (all colonels or marquis of the ancien regime), the plebians born of the Revolution, and finally those who offered their services for fifty centimes. Patriotism consists of picking up the tab for the freebooters. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
re: American dream: time v. money
In a recent lecture, Richard Layard cited a pair of studies one of which showed a relative preference for income and the other an absolute preference for time. For example, given the choice between making $40,000 when the average income was $80,000 or $20,000 when the average was $10,000 people preferred the latter. But given the choice between 4 weeks of vacation when the average was 8 week or 2 weeks when the average was 1 week, people chose the former. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: New Fisk Article
Robert Fisk wrote, Because I rather think that this war's foundations were based not on military planning but on ideology. I would be hard pressed to identify the 'ideology' at the foundation. I think it would be more useful to describe the guiding motivation as an 'aesthetic', in a pseudo-Wagnerian sense. The Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz crowd who _composed_ this horrific Gesamtkunstwerk seem to have been drawn to the aesthetics of 'shock and awe', blitzkreig, decapitation and liberation (with beautiful young [blond?] girls throwing flower petals beneath the feet of the liberators, no doubt). The fantasized 'beauty' of their war to these 'artists' no doubt convinced them that it just had to work. Keep in mind what Karlheinz Stockhausen said about the 9/11 attacks being the greatest work of art. The architects of the Iraq invasion apparently thought that with their vast arsenal of special 'fx' they could, at the very least produce the greatest spectacle ever. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Can't bomb Iraq and tell us to talk to Pak, India tells US
Dear Dubya-Dubya III Duce bin Ledeen, Unlike your designated demon, Saddam Hussein, India and Pakistan have nukular weapons of mass destruction. Maybe after taking out Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia, you'll have enough cruise tomahawks and humvees left for a quick sweep across the sub-continent? New Delhi, March 25: India on Tuesday countered the renewed call by the US for resumption of talks with Pakistan, asking why military action was resorted to against Iraq and Afghanistan instead of dialogue to resolve the crisis confronting the two countries. If dialogue per se is more critical than combating international terrorism with all necessary means, then one can legitimately ask why both in Afghanistan and Iraq military action instead of dialogue has been resorted to, External Affairs Ministry spokesman told reporters. He was asked about remarks made by US State Department spokesman Richard Boucher in Washington that violence will not solve Kashmir's problems. Dialogue remains a critical element in the normalization of relations between India and Pakistan. Chickens. Home. Roost. Duct tape is for dummies; stock up on piano wire. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Ledeen's feral nihilism
Max Sawicky wrote, Interestingly, in the neo-conservative circles in which he runs, Ledeen is known not so much as an Iraq-hawk, but rather as an Iran-hawk. Ledeen's 1985 _Grave New World_ is chock-a-block full of recrimination at what he saw as the Carter administration's loss of Iran. Sort of a who lost China? redux.Viewing the invasion of Iraq as a prelude to massive presure on Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia actually makes more sense -- albeit a macabre and megalomaniacal sense -- than the feeble WMD, 12 years is enough, Saddam is a tyrant, al Qaeda link official justifications. Remember, the speech writers just threw in North Korea so it wouldn't look like Bush was singling out Islamic countries. This farce would be funny if it wasn't so murderous. Or to torture the tragedy/farce cliche, what would the repetition be to a mourning play [trauerspiel]? The right used to talk about overcoming the Vietnam Syndrome, the reluctance to resort to armed conflict. I think what Ledeen wants to overcome could be thought of as the World War I/World War II/Hiroshima Syndrome, the reluctance to engage in total war for the glory of war. It will be interesting to see if our poet-warrior spends the duration sitting on his freedom chair at the AEI or if he takes up arms in middle age like his idol D'Annunzio (supposedly). I hope if he does, he shaves his head first so we can admire the glint of desert sun reflecting off his sublime cranium. I'm not an expert on D'Annunzio. Ledeen is. But from reading Ledeen's account of D'Annunzio's exploits, it strikes me that they may well have been fictional -- sort of an earlier tail-gunner Joe from the days when it would be easier to fake and harder to expose such histrionics (or perhaps not?). In a similar vein, when I read Ledeen's September 13, 2001 NRO column Who Killed Barbara Olson the prose struck me as eerily, calculatedly overwrought. http://www.nationalreview.com/contributors/ledeen091301.shtml Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: From goofy dream to reality?
Ken Hanly wrote, This ass sits on a freedom chair? Cheers Ken Hanly New York Sun March 19, 2003 After Baghdad, Tehran, Damascus, Riyadh Michael A. Ledeen* This ass, Ledeen, is a scary character. To some extent, it may be that his function is to run up trial baloons of how much the administration can get away with. He's independent but very, very well connected -- Perle, Wolfowitz, Abrams, et.al. He was the consultant sent by McFarlane during Iran-Contra to meet with Peres to coordinate intelligence cooperation between Israel and U.S. on making back channel overtures to Iran. In early May of 1985, Michael Ledeen, a part-time consultant to the NSC, obtained National Security Adviser Robert McFarlane's approval to meet in Israel with Prime Minister Shimon Peres to explore whether Israel would share information on Iran with the United States. According to Ledeen, Peres expressed displeasure with Israel's intelligence on Iran and suggested that the United States and Israel should work together to improve their information about and policies toward Iran. He also mentioned a recent Iranian request to buy artillery shells from Israel. Israel would grant the request, Peres said, only if the United States had no objection. Ledeen agreed to relay the question of the proposed weapons sale to McFarlane. (Footnote: For a more detailed discussion of these events, see McFarlane chapter.) Ledeen's wife Barbara was a key player in the astro-turf battle to win confirmation for Clarence Thomas, her organazation subsequently morphed into the Independent Women's Forum and reportedly played a major role in promoting the Clinton impeachment thingy that Hillary referred to as a right-wing conspiracy. There are a number of reports on Ledeen's exploits that I won't repeat because I have no idea about the reliability of some of the sources and others are ones I wouldn't be caught dead citing, Anyone who's interested can satisfy themselves with Google searches on Ledeen and P2 or Billy Carter or Achille Lauro. Ledeen studied fascism and wrote several books on it in the 1970s. One that I'm reading, The First Duce: D'Annunzio at Fiume, seems almost adulatory of the poet-warrior. I would go out on a limb and say that Ledeen's politico-aesthetic vision as reflected in his study of D'Annunzio is the most coherent, if blood curdling, rationale I've seen for current Bush policy. It doesn't reduce down to war is beautiful, but that's probably close enough. Ledeen is a contributing editor to National Review. A guest contribution to NRO is Gabriel Ledeen, who I would hazard a guess is his son and would speculate is named after Gabrielle D'Annunzio. I suppose when the AEI endows a freedom chair, they have in might a certain kind of aesthetic freedom exemplified by the phrase, Fiat ars -- pereat mundus. Tom Walker
Re: Rumsfeld's written repentance
There's another, less optimistic construction that can be put on this: Rumsfeld's happy little blunder was not a blunder but a staged gesture to confirm the Mandelson scenario of arrogant unilateralists v. noble multilateralists and rally sympathy for poor, beleagured good cop Tony Blair. The way the U.S. media is stage managed these days, I would be skeptical about any message that gets out from the administration that isn't on message. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Sy Hersh on news
And according to this story, Perle is threatening to sue Hersh for libel -- England where the libel laws put a severe onus of proof on the defendent http://daily.nysun.com/Repository/getFiles.asp?Style=OliveXLib:ArticleToMailType=text/htmlPath=NYS/2003/03/12ID=Ar00200 Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Bizarre Mandelson hall of mirrors
By Peter Mandelson's curious logic there are really three forces at play in the Iraq debate: multilateralists (good), unilateralists (bad) and multipolarists (irrelevant). The real struggle is between the good multilateralist -- Blair and Powell -- and the bad unilateralists, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Cheney. The foolish multipolarists should line up behind the good multilateralists to defeat the bad unis. Oh yes, and buy this used car from me before some crook tries to sell it to you. http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,911187,00.html Perhaps Mandelson has been staring too long at one of those Escher drawings where people climb up and up and up an optical illusion staircase. The illusion is indeed clever. But anyone who insisted on constructing a building on those architectonic principles should be laughed out of the room. Three-dimensional space cannot be relied on to obey the principles established by two-dimensional representational perspective. If Mandelson believes such extravagant cleverness, he is a fool. If he doesn't, he is a charlatan. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: UK nuclear evidence a fake
Deception is not new but as Chris's 'post modern' suggests, there is something new about the deployment of deception here. My point of reference would be Enron: Enron, Enron. Enron, WorldCom, Tyco, etc.,etc.,etc. What I allude to is a political economy OF deceit, not simply a political economy with deceit. Just-in-time inventory management is primitive accumulation masqueradiing as the production of surplus value. In this _last_ stage_of_capitalism_plus_one, the form of the subsumption of labour under capital is, literally off the balance sheet and it is this fundamental corruption of the mode of production that ultimately finds its ideological expression in the off balance sheet accounting of an Enron. We are undergoing the fall of the other shoe, the first shoe of which was the collapse of the accounting system of the Soviet Bloc. Few have noticed that the reasons for the collapses of the respective accounting systems are actually one reason. Falsehood was no longer incidental but integral to expanded reproduction and accumulation on the basis of the old relations of production. The fruit has gone from being over-ripe to being putrid. Chris Burford, But what Blair and Campbell did was to take somewhat dubious sources and dress them up without giving references or checking sufficiently. I do not think this is quite Machiavelli. It is about management of perceptions in the 21st century. A cavalier attitude to the relative nature of truth can backfire.
re: from god to gdp; from lump of Layard to leisure
Whoa! Shiver me timbers. Quickly skimming through Richard Layard's second lecture of three I am getting the impression that he is inadvertently stumbling over insights that the turn of the last century Cambridge economists took as axiomatic. That is before the ban on comparing utilities came into effect. Layard is one of the economists I took to task a few years ago for his lump of labour triumphalism -- a giddy celebration of the trivial observation that there is not a fixed amount of work. Finally, he notices that growth does not heal all wounds. This is quite remarkable. Even more remarkable, to me, is point 3 in his summation, corrective taxation is needed if my work-life balance is to be efficient. This should be a key doctrine of the Third Way. The owl of Minerva takes flight! Or is there perhaps a swan of Minerva that might break out in song? http://cep.lse.ac.uk/ So what have I been saying? 1. If my income rises I am happier, especially in the short term. 2. But this makes others less happy and the effect on me fades in ways I did not foresee. 3. So corrective taxation is needed if my work-life balance is to be efficient. This should be a key doctrine in the Third Way. 4. We ought not to encourage income comparisons and the zero-sum struggle for rank. 5. External incentives can undermine our internal motivation to do good work. So PRP should be used only with care. 6. Advertising should be controlled, especially towards children. 7. We should redistribute income towards the poor. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Go... Read... NOW! Rowley letter to FBI Director
Rowley letter to FBI Director http://www.startribune.com/stories/484/3738192.html Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Federal Times
POLL Do you think your agency has adequate oversight of its contractors? Yes 8 % (101) No 92 % (1,102) Total votes: 1203 http://federaltimes.com/index.php?showresults=true Tom Walker 604 255 4812
DiaMat redux.
Analysts say both the poor and the rich share a longing for an iron-fisted leader. 'The poor want a Stalin to make short shrift of their enemies, the rich, while the latter want a Stalin to keep the poor at bay,' said Prof. Dzarasov. http://www.hinduonnet.com/thehindu/stories/2003030600831500.htm Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Next
Max wrote, If it's not too obvious, there is now a huge anti-war movement. There is indeed a huge anti-war movement, but underneath my own personal NO WAR slogan is a long-standing critique of the cultural slagheap, political charade and actuarial abyss that has made this war (and the next one, and the next one...) so necessary for the ruling pretenders (it would be extravagent to call that gaggle of snake-oil Bonapartes a class). What we are seeing is analogous to a bankrupt who embezzles to cover-up the bankruptcy and then burns down the warehouse to cover-up the embezzlement. Next the bankrupt/embezzler/arsonist expects to collect on an insurance policy whose premiums were paid with counterfeit bills. A military victory for the U.S. is inevitable, at least to the extent that the type has already been set on the wire stories that affirm the triumph, regardless of what actually happens. We may as well resign ourselves to never knowing what really happened once the shooting starts. It's in the can. All we will know is what we will experience directly in the form of repression and privation. It ain't gonna be pretty. The warehouse fire will not magically restore the bankrupt to prosperity. The task of the anti-war movement will be to understand and explain why the war itself was not the sole cause of the hardships -- to pin the PNAC tail on the (emblematic) Enron donkey, so to speak. Keywords: Bankrupt, embezzlers, arsonists. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
IMF technical assistance advisor nabbed in Argentina
IMF man facing graft charge bailed in Argentina Reuters, 02.15.03, 5:45 PM ET BUENOS AIRES, Argentina (Reuters) - An International Monetary Fund employee, arrested on corruption charges linked to his stint as Peru's economy chief under disgraced ex-President Alberto Fujimori, was freed on bail Saturday pending checks on whether he will face extradition, a court official said. Jorge Baca Campodonico, Peru's economy minister from June 1998 to January 1999, was arrested Thursday by Interpol on charges police say are linked to Peru's ex-spy chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, in a case of misdirected public funds. The IMF Friday voiced concern at the detention of its technical assistance adviser, who came to Buenos Aires as part of a mission to review crisis-ravaged Argentina's fiscal accounts, and arranged legal representation for him. He cannot leave the country, the court official said, adding Baca Campodonico had paid around $10,000 bail. The Federal Judge overseeing the case was trying to ascertain whether he had diplomatic immunity. Baca Campodonico is accused by Peruvian authorities of illegally enriching himself and violating the public's trust. An Argentine federal police spokeswoman said after his arrest that he was linked to the corruption network of Vladimiro Montesinos. Federal Judge Rodolfo Canicoba Corral said Friday Baca Campodonico had a U.N. passport, but added that did not necessarily mean he had diplomatic immunity. IMF officials benefit from such immunity depending on their rank and the jobs they were carrying out, he added. The Argentine government, which has only just managed to clinch a deal to delay having to pay nearly $7 billion in debt it owes the fund in coming months after a year of tortuous negotiations, has sought to distance itself from the arrest. Copyright 2003, Reuters News Service Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: British dossier sham
Tonight, CBC's As it happens interviewed Glen Rangwala, the Oxford instructor who blew the whistle on the plagiarism. I've been following the rather intense coverage this has been receiving in the UK press. The Friday press briefing from 10 Downing St. was amazing, with the Prime Minister's Official Spokesman trying to brush it off as processology. But I wonder how is the U.S. media playing it (or not)? Are they, as I would fear, putting it on a back page and hoping it will go away? Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: redistributionist liberals
Holy Nassau Senior, Perelman! What will become of the morals of our children and young people if those auto workers are turned out of the warm, pure atmosphere of the factory into the heartless and frivolous outer world? Michael Perelman wrote, I am not sure that distribution should be at the center. An auto worker with 30 hours of overtime makes a good wage, but probably does not lead a good life. Marx said that all economics comes down to the economics of time. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: the alienation of labor
Not to romanticize peasant life or traditional popular culture, but it seems to me that in 1844 non-working time had a distinctive character that marked it off as something other than merely not being at work. The development of capitalism has included the manufacture of a leisure time and entertainment industry that pathologically complements working time in a such a way that the worker no longer feels himself only when he is not working. Shopping is the core of this entertainment and is suspended from both production and consumption. That is, one is not _using_ the commodity as per its ostensive use value at the time when one is shopping for it. Presumably the purchase is a symbolic prelude to the enjoyment of the utility. But not necessarily and probably a lot less than one would naively expect. I suspect what I am trying to say is probably better explained in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray. I'd better read it first, though, to be sure. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Oddly enough
http://asia.reuters.com/newsArticle.jhtml?type=oddlyEnoughNewsstoryID=2174773 UN Cover-Up: Guernica Hidden as U.S. Speaks on Iraq Wed February 5, 2003 11:35 AM ET UNITED NATIONS (Reuters) - In a bold cover-up, the United Nations on Wednesday concealed behind a blue cloth and a row of flags the world body's treasured tapestry of Guernica, the celebrated Picasso anti-war masterpiece. The tapestry hangs outside the U.N. Security Council, where Secretary of State Colin Powell was presenting the U.S. case that Iraq is hiding weapons of mass destruction and war may be needed to make sure it disarms. But U.N. officials insisted no symbolism was intended in the decision to hide the tapestry. The cover and flags were meant only to provide a strong visual clue to television cameras filming diplomats in the corridor, the officials said. Picasso's Guernica commemorates a small Basque village in northern Spain that was used by Germany for bombing practice for more than three hours on April 27, 1937. The raid killed or wounded some 1,600 civilians and left the village in flames for three days. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
The Tragedy
Shuttle Disaster Hurts Retail Sales Tue 10:07am ET - Reuters Nonstop television coverage of the space shuttle Columbia disaster on Saturday kept riveted consumers away from stores, hurting retail demand last week, according to a report released on Tuesday. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Imperial grief
Excellent commentary, Carrol! Thank you. I think the best commentary was written about 60 years ago -- Carrol Deportee The crops are all in and the peaches are rotting, The oranges are piled in their creosote dumps. You are flying them back to the Mexican border To pay all their money to wade back again. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Art notes from all over
April 26, 1937 was market day in the small city of Guernica, located in the Spains Basque region. On that terrible day, Hitler's war planes, supporting General Franco and his troops that were engaged in the Spanish Civil War, bombarded the quiet city. Most men had already left the city to fight at the front, leaving mostly women, children, and the elderly behind. The bombardment lasted for three and a half hours, destroying 70 percent of the city and claiming 1600 lives, one third of the population. ... THE Pentagon has drawn up a blueprint for a shock and awe air assault on Iraq which will concentrate on killing as many of its leaders as possible and cutting the survivors off from contact with their troops in the field. Military planners believe they can minimise allied casualties by targeting Saddam Hussein, his ministers and the command element of his security services and Republican Guard divisions to stun the mass of the Iraqi army into either surrender or rebellion. The strategy calls for two days of overwhelming aerial bombardment with up to 900 Tomahawk cruise missiles and pinpoint strikes by stealth bombers against leadership centres in Baghdad and Tikrit. You will see simultaneous attacks on hundreds if not thousands of key points. No matter how they try to disperse, a large percentage of the Iraqi senior commanders will be dead in the first few hours, Harlan Ullman, a military analyst at Washington's centre for strategic and international studies, said yesterday. It's all designed to convince the ordinary Iraqi soldier that his personal situation is hopeless and certainly beyond the control of Saddam and his cronies. . ... Guernica Reproduction Covered at UN NEW YORK.- The Guernica work by Pablo Picasso at the entrance of the Security Council of the United Nations has been covered with a curtain. The reason for covering this work is that this is the place where diplomats make statements to the press and have this work as the background. The Picasso work features the horrors of war. On January 27 a large blue curtain was placed to cover the work. Fred Eckhard, press secretary of the U.N. said: It is an appropriate background for the cameras. He was questioned as to why the work had been covered. A diplomat stated that it would not be an appropriate background if the ambassador of the United States at the U.N. John Negroponte, or Powell, talk about war surrounded with women, children and animals shouting with horror and showing the suffering of the bombings. This work is a reproduction of the Guernica that was donated by Nelson A. Rockefeller to the U.N. in 1985. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Shock and Awe: Guernica Revisited
, he may soon find himself standing shoulder-to-shoulder with Mr. Hussein and facing history's judgment as another ruthless leader who killed his own people in a mad bid for power. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Moron vows to persecute war criminals
I just heard a clip of this on CBC. Presumably he meant prosecuted but one never knows, does one? He said if an order is handed down to use such weapons, Iraqi forces must disobey. Should any Iraqi officer or soldier receive an order from Saddam Hussein or his sons or any of the killers who occupy the high levels of their government, my advice is, don't follow that order. Because if you choose to do so, when Iraq is liberated, you will be treated, tried and persecuted as a war criminal, said President Bush. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Artificial economic inefficiency
The technical name for it is fraud. The problem with using the technical name, though, is that when the state overtly sanctions a fraudulent transaction, calling that transaction by its proper name may sound like hyperbole. The fraud consists of representing as a sale what is in effect a rental. By building in the exclusive ink chip, the seller of the printer retains effectuve ownership of it. Bill Lear asked, I'm curious what the technical name for this sort of barrier to economic efficiency is. Has anyone ever cataloged this sort of thing? I'd be very interested if so ... Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: A feeling robot sensor for soldiers in the field
Fucking incompetents. Why not stick a catheter up the commander's ass and when he shits himself they'll know he's in trouble. The human commander may get into trouble but be unable to ask for help, said Nilanjan Sarkar, team member and assistant professor of Vanderbilt University's Department of Mechanical Engineering. In cases like these his robot assistant will be able to detect his stress and either communicate the need for assistance or assist in some way itself. The robot's sensors consist of an electrocardiogram to record heartbeat, a skin sensor that can detect tiny changes in sweat production, an electromyography sensor that detects minute muscle activity in the jaw and brow, a blood-volume pressure sensor that measures the constriction on the arteries and a temperature sensor. The robot uses algorithms to translate the information it gets from the sensors into a format it can understand, Sarkar said. One of our most important claims is that the robot can process this information in real time. So far tests with the robot have proved promising. The machine responds on cue to signals of distress and approaches its human counterpart to ask if he's OK. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: The Economist considers Karl Marx
Louis Proyect wrote, It is astonishing, for example, that the Economist can say: Class war is the sine qua non of Marx. But the class war, if it ever existed, is over. In western democracies today, who chooses who rules, and for how long? Who tells governments how companies will be regulated? Who in the end owns the companies? Workers for hire--the proletariat. Oh those proles, the lucky duckies: they own the companies, they tell the government what to do, they choose who rules... and they don't even have to pay taxes! http://www.salon.com/comics/boll/2002/12/19/boll/index.html?x Could it be that the Wall Street Journal and the Economist have been infiltrated by Onion satirists? Tom Walker
Re: Sodexho-Workers-Colleges
Ahmet, I did a dossier on Sodexho for the B.C. Hospital Employees Union about 6 months ago. A copy of it is online at: http://www.cupe.ca/downloads/sodexho_profile.pdf Tom Walker 604 255 4812
a poem stolen from a NYT article about IKEA
the nicked veneers and wobbly joints of Ikea regret self-assembled furniture requires retightening over time We sold screwdrivers like you can't believe. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: War and property tax
So what ever happened to the old custom of the king personally leading the troops into battle? Tom Walker
Left sweeps to victory in Vancouver
From the CBC: Real-life Da Vinci leads sweep in Vancouver elections Last Updated Sun, 17 Nov 2002 9:54:49 VANCOUVER - A former Mountie and coroner who inspired a CBC Television series won a landslide election on Saturday to become the next mayor of Vancouver. Larry Campbell, the real-life inspiration for the title character in the crime drama Da Vinci's Inquest led his party to a sweeping victory in municipal elections. Despite rain and heavy winds, voters headed to the polls in huge numbers. Turnout was markedly higher than in the last elections three years ago, and among the highest in decades. Campbell's left-wing Coalition of Progressive Electors (COPE) had its most impressive showing since the party entered Vancouver politics in the 1960s. In that time, it had never elected a mayor or held a majority on council. This time, every COPE candidate running won. They won seats on the parks board, the school board, and city council. http://www.cbc.ca/stories/2002/11/17/vcr_elxn021117 Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: economy in novels
Oh, I almost forgot to mention Walter Brierley's The Sandwichman, 1937. I recommended this one before in reply to a Pen-l thread a couple of years ago on Workplace Literature. So I'll just recycle my 2 1/2 year old message: Louis Proyect wrote or quoted: Marx warned that, in a capitalist system, the worker becomes a commodity, and indeed, the most despised of commodities. Saunders' correction is that the worker becomes an advertisement, and, indeed, the most wretchedly inarticulate of advertisements. . . I would like to here and now start a cult for a 1937 book by Walter Brierley titled, The Sandwichman. Actually, I'd like to start a cult for about 25 pages in the book, from 201 to 226, wherein the unemployed protagonist, Arthur Gardner, temporarily works at two 'jobs'. The first assignment is as the sandwichman of the book's title, advertising a sale at a furniture store. The second is as an adult education night school lecturer, presenting a series of six lectures on drama, one on pre-Shakespearean, one -- or two, perhaps -- on Shakespeare, then Restoration and the Romantic comedy in one, then two on the moderns. As a sandwichman for the furniture store, Arthur wears a sign that proclaims: SALE! SALE! SALE! LATHAM'S! LATHAM'S! LATHAMS!. His lectures, in Fritchburn, a little village about half-way between Pirley and Leawood, are advertised by an paper stuck to a bus-stop hoarding announcing Arthur's name in large capitals and the subject of that evening's lecture. Arthur manages to delude himself into believing that hawking culture as if it were furniture is somehow more 'respectible' than hawking furniture, but other than the delusion, the former comes off as a more profound humiliation than the former. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Economy in novels
The Scarlet Empire, David M. Parry, 1906. This one is definitely not post WWII, but it is notable for its explicit treatment of the point of view of American right-wing industrialists. Parry was president of the National Association of Manufacturers at the time he wrote the novel and the N.A.M. was engaged in its infamous open shop campaign of union busting. The novel, set in the undersea socialist dystopia of Atlantis projects the dire consequences of legislation establishing an eight-hour day. For a stark contrast, pair that chestnut with Gabe Sinclair's _The Four Hour Day_, 2000 http://www.fourhourday.org/, Taken together, the two novels neatly bookend the 20th century and its distracted economic thinking. In my view, they also clearly show why the central economic question is the determination of the hours of work, not the determination of the prices of commodities. To the extent that political economy focuses on the latter and neglects the former, it is an exercise in mystification. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
RE: Aesopian Language on Maillists
the death of Satan was a tragedy for the imagination -- Wallace Stevens Satan is NOT dead, 'e's just pinin' for the fjords. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: outsourcing the State
This is inherent to getting the taxpayers the best deal for their dollars and the best service from the government, said Trent Duffy, spokesman for the Office of Management and Budget. It's called building a permanent Republican party gravy train. The only thing inherent in the plan is the stench of corruption. The Government Accounting Office has determined that public-private competition will save taxpayers 30 percent on each contract. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! And they charged poor Andy Fastow for pilfering the petty cash box! Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha! Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Re: RE: Aesopian Language on Maillists
Joanna Bujes wrote: well, wouldn't you be? Joanna At 05:50 PM 11/14/2002 -0800, you wrote: the death of Satan was a tragedy for the imagination -- Wallace Stevens Satan is NOT dead, 'e's just pinin' for the fjords. Not really. I'm one hour away from 'em by bus, 40 min. by car.
Re: Negri explains the multitude
...the multiplicity that refuses to represent itself in the dialectical Aufhebung Surely Negri means bong? Rhyzomatic is clearly an allusion to Guattari and Deleuze. I would translate the passage as a whole to mean, roughly, shit happens.Negri has presumably eschewed that more compact formulation for the sake of avoiding its imminent reflexive implications. I hope this helps. As for Doug's worrying about wasting time on Negri and the Nation while the U.S. is under the control of a frightening gang of lunatics hellbent on war with a good bit of the world: shit happens, Doug. And time marches on. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Re: Negri explains the multitude
I wrote, ...shit happens, Doug. And time marches on. Doug Henwood replied, Oh, of course. Why didn't I think of that? Presumably because you have other fish to fry and a hard row to hoe. Tom Walker 604 255 4812
Curious
VNS Unable to Deliver Exit Polls ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox News Channel -- anticipating possible problems with exit polls -- each did last-minute telephone surveys to gauge voter attitudes. Fox conducted its survey in 10 states on Monday night and Tuesday and used some of those findings on the air. VNS hired Battelle Memorial Institute, an Ohio-based technology company that also works as a defense contractor to help build the new VNS system. A Battelle spokeswoman declined comment on Tuesday's performance. Ted Savaglio, VNS executive director, said he was disappointed with Battelle's work. He wouldn't comment on VNS' future. http://www.newsday.com/news/politics/wire/sns-ap-eln-voter-news-service1106n ov06,0,2579073.story?coll=sns-ap-politics-headlines FBI Investigates Possible Financial Motive in Anthrax Attacks DNA tests have confirmed that the spores used in the terrorist attacks are genetically identical to a strain obtained by researchers at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute for Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Fort Detrick, Md., in about 1980. The Army has acknowledged distributing the strain to five other agencies, and some of the strain was in turn shared with other researchers. The five labs that received the Ames strain from USAMRIID are the Army's Dugway Proving Ground in central Utah; Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio; the University of New Mexico's Health Sciences Center in Albuquerque; the Canadian DRES; and Porton Down. Battelle, a private contractor that has worked with the Pentagon in developing defenses against biological attacks, is one of several labs visited by FBI agents investigating the anthrax attacks. Katy Delaney, a Battelle spokeswoman, said the company has cooperated fully with the government's investigation. FBI agents have interviewed people on our staff, Delaney said, but she declined to provide information about the nature of the interviews or how many Battelle employees had been questioned. I can say that we have continued to provide all of the information and material that has been requested by the government, Delaney said. Battelle is a contractor at Dugway, which last week acknowledged making a powdered form of anthrax to use in testing sensors and other equipment used to defend against biological attacks. http://www.ph.ucla.edu/epi/bioter/FBIfinancialmotive.html
RE: Frontiers of rational expectations
What I want to know is: is there any money in a correct prediction and if there is, how does one collect if one is dead? Tom Walker 604 255 4812
