Re: Chavez question
Half the British working classes regularly voted for Thatcher. Vast numbers of American workers are rock-solid Republicans. Why do people vote against their own interests? This question is an old topic. Frank's Kansas book is the current best left survey of the question from a US perspective; Mike Davis's old Prisoners of the American Dream the best general (US) take I know. Why it might happen in Venezuala I don't know. Btw, an old college friend of mine I haven't spoken to in decades, but we were really close in college, Andres Mata, is editor of El Universal downin VZ, he's not a Chavez supporter, but maybe I might try to get in touch with him and ask what he thinks. It would be an excuse to try to re-establish a connection, anyway: From the BBC: Friday, 12 April, 2002, 16:13 GMT 17:13 UK Venezuela press condemns 'autocrat' Chavez Mr Chavez resigned under military pressure Venezuela's major newspapers have welcomed the ousting of Hugo Chavez, heaping condemnation and insult on the deposed president. Nowhere were the attacks more virulent than in the pages of El Nacional, which called him a coward who had brought the country to the verge of chaos. With this miserable and cruel act, you committed the worst of your political errors and betrayed your country El Nacional "We all knew about his mental problems, that he would shrink when the real battle started, but we ignored his lack of scruples, which became manifest when he ordered his sharpshooters to open fire on innocent people." "With this miserable and cruel act, you committed the worst of your political errors and betrayed your country." El Nacional accused Mr Chavez, a former paratrooper, of "soiling the military uniform and the institution which gave you an opportunity in life". "They say history elevates or buries men; for you it has reserved a pit beside the Venezuelan leaders infamous for their atrocities." Your obsessions have cost Venezuela countless moral and material losses, never has so much madness been seen in this land El Nacional His threats to shut down the main television stations were akin to "turning Venezuela into a jungle", the daily said. "Your obsessions have cost Venezuela countless moral and material losses, never has so much madness been seen in this land." Shared responsibility For the editor of El Universal, Andres A Mata, Mr Chavez is an autocrat who has lost his way. After being freely elected as a democratic leader, Chavez stopped being one Andres A. Mata "After being freely elected as a democratic leader, Chavez stopped being one." In his piece headlined, "Hugo Chavez: An autocrat in both style and substance", Mr Mata says the former president also violated several international laws "He violated the Inter-American Democratic Charter by denying Venezuelan workers the right to meet freely and hold open elections... He violated the Rio Agreement in publicly declaring on more than one occasion that Afghanistan is only an example of the terrorism sponsored by the United States worldwide." Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Thank God he won! Still, I have a question. If 70% of the people are poor, how didthe opposition get so many votes?--Michael PerelmanEconomics DepartmentCalifornia State UniversityChico, CA 95929Tel. 530-898-5321E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!
Re: Economics and law
---Didn't the Bolsheviks at one point deliberately try toimmitate aspects of American big capital? (I'mreviewing Yale Rochmond's Cultural Exchange and theCold War, and he asserts this.)* * Lenin expressly holds up Taylorism as an ideal for Soviet industry at a couple of points. I could find the references if you wanted.But I think the Bolshies were more impressed with German war planning planning, which was more familiar to them. Gramsci conceived of Fordism not only asa tool of analysis but as containing elements of a Communist society. jks Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish.
Re: Economics and law
I agree with your reservations about the term Stalinism, I just don't have a better one. I agree with about the good Czar with under Stalinism, but that is not an example of socialist democracy -- I don't think you think it is either. jksChris Doss [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- andie nachgeborenen don't care if it isn't a Russian word, I don't thinkthe Russians understand the Soviet era any better thanWestern specialists. Which isn't very well -- I speakhaving been one once.--Well, the Russians (Ukrainians, Latvians, etc. etc.etc.) do have the advantage of having lived there.Then again they had poor access to information (as didWesterners, in a different way.)My problem is that 1) the word "Stalinism" is used fora whole lot of different societies and periods, sothat Romania is treated as no different from the GDR,or the Khrushchev era is referred to as "Stalinist"even though he denounced the Father of the Peoples,and 2) when the word is applied in the West it isusually tied up with a bunch of misconceptions aboutwhat life was actually like in those countries.---As rto Charles and Chris' point that Stalinistrepression was selective and popular and that theregime took account of public opinion, of course. Werevisionist Sovietologists argued that point againstthe totalitarianism school for 35 years. That doesn'tmean, however, that Stalinism was democratic or thatit was controlled by ordinary working people the waymost of us here would want socialism to be. That isobvious too, don't you agree? I mean, as the Old Mansaid, a worker's state wouldn't have a politicalpolice.--Oh, the backing of the people for Stalin was more likethe backing of the simple people for the tsars or thePharoah than anything else. In the 30s, the USSR wasstill a largely illiterate peasant country with littleaccess to information whose populace was used toseeing the Leader as something akin to God. Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage!
Re: Economics and law
Do we really know at all what a socialist society would do about transportation safety? I think trying to predict from the hostory of Stalinist societies is a very shaky guide. A socialist society, as most conceive it in this list, would be one where there would be a lot more democratic input into decisions about how much weight to give values like transportation safety. Of course the very hallmark of Stalinism was that there was very little democratic input into such decisions. So you can't tell much from what people would do when they hadno say about what they might do if they had a real say. Now, we might guess that if they had a say they would prefer to be safer, but (as this thread began) safety competes with other things that might matter a lot to them too. Cost in resources, availability of transportation, etc. So it's not really possible to say how the debate would come out beforehand. jks"David B. Shemano" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Kenneth Campbell writes: How about West and East Germany? Can't complain about different historical development. I think most might agree that there is a very different historical development between the parts of Germany that were east and west. Check it out. Pretty main stream. And, after the war, the east had a different trajectory, as well, based on need of the conquering powers. You seem to know history... help me out here... Which one of the two countries that has "US" in its acronym... which one lost about 25 million people in the war... and had cities bombed, occupied, dismantled, bombed again... I stand by the position that if you refuse to consider historical evidence and insist on speculating about what could happen in utopia: cop out. I say the same thing! Brother, we've found each other at last!Let's try one last time. The suggestion was made that a socialist economy will more highly value transportation safety than a capitalist economy. Every historical example I come up with to try and test the suggestion, you say is not an appropriate comparison. For example, you imply there is apparently something in the historical development of East Germany, as compared to West Germany, that would cause East Germany auto manufacturers not to value safety as much as their West German counterparts, even though the East Germans had a socialist economy and West Germany had a capitalist economy, but such fact has no relevance for the validity of the suggestion that socialist economies value safety more than capitalist economies. I am at a loss how to respond.How do you propose to test the hypothesis? Is there nothing relevant from 75 years of historical experience that will satisfy you?David Shemano Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - Helps protect you from nasty viruses.
Re: Economics and law
Where did you get it? It's not like there is a Lada dealership on every corner . . . jksDaniel Davies [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I drove a Lada for five years. It was fourteen years old when I got it andwas still going just fine when I gave it away last month. They were builtoff the plans of old Fiats.dd-Original Message-From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Chris DossSent: 13 August 2004 07:42To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]Subject: Re: Economics and lawDavid:Cop out. In my experience, there was one example ofasocialist inspired car in the capitalist market: theYugo.Case closed.---This is totally untrue. The USSR exported automobilesto Latin America and elsewhere. Russia and Belarusexport tractors to Australia to this day, where Ladas,I am told, have a cult following.Those vehicles break down a lot, but then again theyare easy to repair.__Do you Yahoo!?Yahoo! Mail - 50x more storage than other providers!http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out!
Re: Economics and law
Well, I don't want to get into this distraction on the Russian question, but you could call the system bureaucratic collectivism (Schachtman's term) or the command-administrative system (the perestroichiki's term), or totalitarianism, or lots of things, but the fact is we don't really havea good name for it. Stalinism is unfortunate insofarr as it suggests than man was responsible for the whole thing, which is absurd, but it is also true taht he shaped the system more than anyone else and that he exemplified the social forces that created it. So I'll use it anyway. I don't care if it isn't a Russian word, I don't think the Russians understand the Soviet era any better than Western specialists. Which isn't very well -- I speak having been one once. As rto Charles and Chris' point that Stalinist repression was selective and popular and that the regime took account of public opinion, of course. We revisionist Sovietologists argued that point against the totalitarianism school for 35 years. That doesn't mean, however, thatStalinism was democratic or that it was controlled by ordinary working people the way most of us here would want socialism to be. That is obvious too, don't you agree? I mean, as the Old Man said, a worker's state wouldn't have a political police. jksChris Doss [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- Charles Brown <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote:CB: It is not quite clear that because there was aGulag, show trialsofParty members and other acts of state repression onspecific occasions,thatthere was no or little democratic process in decisionson other mattersinSoviet society during Stalin's rule or "Stalinism" (other matters suchasdecisions on transportation safety)---Me : In the Brezhnev era, the primary domestic purposeof KGB informers was to gauge public opinion withrespect to this or that government policy.I personally hate the word "Stalinism." It's not evena Russian word (it is now, but it was imported). Whatexactly does it mean? And why the obsession with one man?__Do you Yahoo!?New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - 100MB free storage!http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail Do you Yahoo!? New and Improved Yahoo! Mail - Send 10MB messages!
Re: Economics and law
" David, the problem with the Pinto is that the government does notadequately regulate safety -- not even to the extent of making relevantinformation available -- so the regulation is left to the lawsuits -- avery inefficient way of doing things. Doesn't Richard Epstein (the Chicago LE extremist who argues that we shoukd destroy the administarive/welfare state withTakings Clause of the Constitution)argue, in Simple Rules For A Complex World, that regulation by lawsuits is the most efficient form of regulation? I can't recall how the argument goes though. I don't know about auto safety, but the govt definitely goes overboard in safety regulations of other things -- drugs, for example. The FDA won't allwo lots drugs that have been proven OK are are widely available in other industrualized countries. I wonder why that is.Maybe taht raises the cost of drugs, thus providing larger profits for Big Pharma. That's pretty vulgar Maexist of me, of course. I think it depends on the area. A few bucks for a protective gasket would not have meant that much. Inhindsight it was stupid, but very costly for a number of innocentpeople. Actually the Pinto case raises a very deep and extremely hard issue. What exactly whas it that Ford did that seems to terribly wrong? I don't dispute the idea that Ford did something bad, but what was it? As David says, we know as sure as God made little green apples that every design decision an automaker makes will cost lives. Even if the decision is to build every car to be a tank. Each individual choice may be small in terms of the cost, but of course if cars are made maximally safe they will be tanks,and very expensive.Which no one wants.What we don't know, unless we study it beforehand, is how many lives each decision will cost. Was wrong of Ford to calculate the cost in lives beforehand? Is ignorance better? Well, Ford also calculated the cost in term of money, gave money values to the wrongful death and negligence lawsuits that might expected to occur as the result of making the decision, decided that it was worth it in terms of profitspaying that cost and letting the additional people die. That seems cold-blooded, it was the basis of the criminal prosecution that failed. But we also know that any design decision means deaths, lawsuits, effects on profits. Is it bad or wrong to think about those things in making the design decisions? Or to think about them too clearly on the basis of quantified estimates?It should rather be done vaguely, by guesses? I am actually rather at a loss how to approach this one. As a socialist I am sort of inclined to say that in capitalism the problem is not that we get accurate information about the costs, including in lives, of our choices, but that the nature of the system is that considerations of profit tend to dominate the process. But even a socialist society would have to accept that its design decisions would lead to deaths. Safety is not free, and we are not willing or able to pay an infinite price for it. jks Michael PerelmanEconomics DepartmentCalifornia State UniversityChico, CA95929-Original Message-From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of David B.ShemanoSent: Tuesday, August 10, 2004 12:55 PMTo: [EMAIL PROTECTED]Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Economics and lawRegarding the Pinto, cost/benefit analysis, etc., what exactly is theissue? I mean, we know with certainty that a certain number of peopleare going to die each year from auto accidents. We also know that if wereduced the speed limit to 5 m.p.h. required all passengers to wearhelmets, required safety designs used for race cars, etc., the deathswould all be eliminated. But we don't, because the costs of doing sowould be astronomical, and most people seem prepared to assume certainrisks in consideration for conveniences and benefits. So is the problemthe concept of cost/benefit analysis, the improper implementation ofcost/benefit analysis, or disagreement about what are costs andbenefits? If you reject cost/benefit analysis, how could you everdecide whether any marginal rule should be accepted or rejected? Whydoes this issue have anything to do with capitalism/socialism -- wouldnot these issues have to be addressed no matter how the society isorganized?David Shemano Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail is new and improved - Check it out!
Re: calling for the assassination of the President is against the law
we take all threats to the President seriously; we have opened an investigation.Does anyone remember this, or have any references, or know where the relevant law might be in the U.S. code?-- There's this: 18 U.S.C.A. § 115United States Code Annotated Currentness Title 18. Crimes and Criminal Procedure (Refs Annos) Part I. Crimes Chapter 7. Assault § 115. Influencing, impeding, or retaliating against a Federal official by threatening or injuring a family member (a)(1) Whoever-- (A) assaults, kidnaps, or murders, or attempts or conspires to kidnap or murder, or threatens to assault, kidnap or murder a member of the immediate family of a United States official, a United States judge, a Federal law enforcement officer, or an official whose killing would be a crime under section 1114 of this title; or (B) threatens to assault, kidnap, or murder, a United States official, a United States judge, a Federal law enforcement officer, or an official whose killing would be a crime under such section, with intent to impede, intimidate, or interfere with such official, judge, or law enforcement officer while engaged in the performance of official duties, or with intent to retaliate against such official, judge, or law enforcement officer on account of the performance of official duties, shall be punished as provided in subsection (b). (2) Whoever assaults, kidnaps, or murders, or attempts or conspires to kidnap or murder, or threatens to assault, kidnap, or murder, any person who formerly served as a person designated in paragraph (1), or a member of the immediate family of any person who formerly served as a person designated in paragraph (1), with intent to retaliate against such person on account of the performance of official duties during the term of service of such person, shall be punished as provided in subsection (b). (b)(1) An assault in violation of this section shall be punished as provided in section 111 of this title. (2) A kidnapping, attempted kidnapping, or conspiracy to kidnap in violation of this section shall be punished as provided in section 1201 of this title for the kidnapping or attempted kidnapping of, or a conspiracy to kidnap, a person described in section 1201(a)(5) of this title. (3) A murder, attempted murder, or conspiracy to murder in violation of this section shall be punished as provided in sections , 1113, and 1117 of this title. (4) A threat made in violation of this section shall be punished by a fine under this title or imprisonment for a term of not more than 10 years, or both, except that imprisonment for a threatened assault shall not exceed 6 years. (c) As used in this section, the term-- (1) "Federal law enforcement officer" means any officer, agent, or employee of the United States authorized by law or by a Government agency to engage in or supervise the prevention, detection, investigation, or prosecution of any violation of Federal criminal law; (2) "immediate family member" of an individual means-- (A) his spouse, parent, brother or sister, child or person to whom he stands in loco parentis; or (B) any other person living in his household and related to him by blood or marriage; (3) "United States judge" means any judicial officer of the United States, and includes a justice of the Supreme Court and a United States magistrate judge; and (4) "United States official" means the President, President-elect, Vice President, Vice President-elect, a Member of Congress, a member-elect of Congress, a member of the executive branch who is the head of a department listed in 5 U.S.C. 101, or the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. (d) This section shall not interfere with the investigative authority of the United States Secret Service, as provided under sections 3056, 871, and 879 of this title. __Do You Yahoo!?Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Thomas Frank op-ed piece
Social democracy is as dead as stalinism. Both were equallydiscredited by the events of the twentieth century. Justin argues thatthere will never again be mass "Marxist" parties. Could be. But the sameargument suggests that there will never again be mass social democraticparties. But aren't there? I mean right now, SD parties govern large chunks of the industrialized world outside the US. They're not militant, sometimes they lean toward neoliberalis, but they command electoral majorities. Not here in the US of course. Here they never took off. And if there can be no more social democratic parties (andclassical liberalism is one would think equally dead) all the jargon andpieties of social democracy (lesser evils, small gains, progressive wingof bourgeosie) Is that how they talk in Europe? are as dead as the slogans of Stalin's _Foundations ofLeninism_. Those leftists appealing to the social democratic tradition(e.g., cooperation with progressive or less reactionary bourgeoispoliticians) are as trapped in dead pieties as are the Sparticists. ABBsand Sparticists unite in the Graveyard. So, we're fucked, right, Carroll? Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish.
Re: Martha Stewart and 18 USC 1001
Right, the lesson is, don't lie to the feds. In a criminal case, you don't even have to talk to them unless they immunize you. I was fairly flabbergasted when I learned a out 1001 in my White Collar Crime class. And like all laws, it poses a greater danger to the poor, because the poor aren't typically going to be represented by high priced defense counsel. (Although there are many excellent lawyers in the Federal Public Defenders office.) I'm not sure that the poor are more likely to be scared than the rich. No one looking into the cold eyes of the US Attorney's Office is going to feel very cheery. Immigrants definitely are more likely to be scared than citizens. But, as a Bulgarian lawyer in the Chicago Guild chapter often reminds me, immigrants have no rights anyway. jks Perhaps, a more compelling reason for leftists to take a second look at the Martha Stewart affair is 18 USC 1001: [D]efense lawyers for white-collar criminal cases say the focus on Ms. Stewart's celebrity misses the point. The real lesson of the case, they say, is that it once again proves the potency of a little-known federal law that has become a crucial weapon for prosecutors. The law, which lawyers usually call 1001, for the section of the federal code that contains it, prohibits lying to any federal agent, even by a person who is not under oath and even by a person who has committed no other crime. Ms. Stewart's case illustrates the breadth of the law, legal experts say. . . . From social welfare to immigration to criminal justice, 18 USC 1001 is likely to present a far more danger to the poor than to the rich, especially during the endless war on terrorism. The full posting at http://montages.blogspot.com/2004/05/martha-stewart-and-18-usc-1001.html. -- Yoshie * Critical Montages: http://montages.blogspot.com/ * Bring Them Home Now! http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/ * Calendars of Events in Columbus: http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html, http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php, http://www.cpanews.org/ * Student International Forum: http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/ * Committee for Justice in Palestine: http://www.osudivest.org/ * Al-Awda-Ohio: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio * Solidarity: http://www.solidarity-us.org/ __ Do You Yahoo!? Tired of spam? Yahoo! Mail has the best spam protection around http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: NY Review of Books
--- Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: the New YoIrk Review of Books (http://www.nybooks.com/), which is considered the premier intellectual print journal outside of academia. [ In the 80s the NYRB shifted to the right, but some say it has shifted back . . . ] . . . In trying to explain the New York Review's alleged shift to the left, [which Louis disputes, for various good reasons, mostly about foreign policy.] No one would argue today that the NYRB is a journal of the left, or that it is as comparatively radical as it once was. What it does have is some diversity of opinion, and a fair number of good articles. Even Louis -- maybe especially Louis -- should like Elizabeth Drew's article in the current issue about how the rudderless Democrats are working hard to blow what many even on the left consider to be an election that (a) they could and should win, and (b) is the most important in a generation. It also publishes Gary Wills a lot. jks __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Domains Claim yours for only $14.70/year http://smallbusiness.promotions.yahoo.com/offer
Re: game theory
Nash went mad, but you can't argue with his maths. you can easily argue about the applicability of the math. Math doesn't correspond to reality; it only represents the abstract dimension. By the way, Nash is currently deemed sane. And his sanity or insanity has nothing to do with the validity of the Nash equilibrium concept or of game theory. I actually knew Nash a bit when he was mad. The math majors at Tigetown called him the Ghost of Fine Hall. He would scrawl brilliant and bitingly hilarious formulae on the blackboards -- not at all like the merely wacko stuff depicted in the movie, much funnier. Political too. And not right wing. Apparently he hated Nixon. That wasn't hard, of course. My friend (at the time, haven't been in touch in years) Dave Donoho, now a hotshot stat prof at Stanford, said that mathematically Nash's crazy formulae _almost_ made sense. Sorry I teed you off about your post on madness, but frankly I was surprised to read your remarks about GT in the context of the Westlake book and your substantive post -- reread them yourself and see if you can see how someone might understand the point the way I did. Of course I know it's easy to be misconstrued, having had it happy to me a lot. But as a lawyer I've learned to assume that it's not necessarily the other guy's fault -- something I for one at least didn't learn as an academic. Maybe you have, but if so, given that you know how hard it to be clear and how easy it is to me misunderstood, maybe it would be helpful to be less uptight about being misunderstood even if it is the other guy's fault. For instance, not that I am a shining examplar of anything, I said about eight times in my post that GT was an abstraction, an idealization, and based on false premises, and yet apparently I still wasn't clear enough. Still, it's not worth getting mad about . . . . jks __ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! - Internet access at a great low price. http://promo.yahoo.com/sbc/
Re: game theory/oops
The below was supposed to be off-list, sorry. jks --- andie nachgeborenen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Nash went mad, but you can't argue with his maths. you can easily argue about the applicability of the math. Math doesn't correspond to reality; it only represents the abstract dimension. By the way, Nash is currently deemed sane. And his sanity or insanity has nothing to do with the validity of the Nash equilibrium concept or of game theory. I actually knew Nash a bit when he was mad. The math majors at Tigetown called him the Ghost of Fine Hall. He would scrawl brilliant and bitingly hilarious formulae on the blackboards -- not at all like the merely wacko stuff depicted in the movie, much funnier. Political too. And not right wing. Apparently he hated Nixon. That wasn't hard, of course. My friend (at the time, haven't been in touch in years) Dave Donoho, now a hotshot stat prof at Stanford, said that mathematically Nash's crazy formulae _almost_ made sense. Sorry I teed you off about your post on madness, but frankly I was surprised to read your remarks about GT in the context of the Westlake book and your substantive post -- reread them yourself and see if you can see how someone might understand the point the way I did. Of course I know it's easy to be misconstrued, having had it happy to me a lot. But as a lawyer I've learned to assume that it's not necessarily the other guy's fault -- something I for one at least didn't learn as an academic. Maybe you have, but if so, given that you know how hard it to be clear and how easy it is to me misunderstood, maybe it would be helpful to be less uptight about being misunderstood even if it is the other guy's fault. For instance, not that I am a shining examplar of anything, I said about eight times in my post that GT was an abstraction, an idealization, and based on false premises, and yet apparently I still wasn't clear enough. Still, it's not worth getting mad about . . . . jks __ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! - Internet access at a great low price. http://promo.yahoo.com/sbc/ __ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! - Internet access at a great low price. http://promo.yahoo.com/sbc/
Re: game theory
--- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: over the years, I've discovered that I have a hard time getting mad at someone because of their political opinions. If someone is a Malthusian (say), I tend to pity them for not thinking clearly. But when someone misinterprets what I say -- especially when I write it down in clear prose that I edit and re-edit (and I even spell-check) -- it somehow rubs one of my neuroses the wrong way. And then the critic makes many of the points I did! BTW, bringing up GT and Nash using a comic novel does not inherently imply a critique of either. Comic novels can be just as profound as tragic ones. I've seen the house-of-mirrors analogy in GT books. While we're on the subject, I think it's worth discussing the role of Nash's madness (paranoid schizophrenia and, according to a shrink I know, Asperger's Syndrome). One of the hats I wear is as the father of a kid with mental problems (Asperger's Syndrome, ADD, maybe bipolar (manic-depressive), maybe psychosis (not otherwise specified)). One of the things that comes out in the millieu that this role has thrust me into is that _being crazy ain't all bad and can actually be a good thing_ in some situations. Some of the most brilliant people in the world have been stark raving nuts. Einstein (maybe Asperger's Syndrome, though those with other disorders also claim him) was hardly a normal person. One's madness can give one insights that so-called normal people (neurotypicals) are _totally incapable_ of achieving. People who live well-adjusted lives in conjunction with others and have no inner turmoil have a hard time thinking outside the box the way Einstein or Nash did. Einstein's Gedanken (sp?) experiments and Nash's brilliant insight come from non-neurotypical thinking. I do think that Nash's equilibrium concept was brilliant. However, the concept has been reified, worshiped and worse. It's the reification that's the problem. That reflects a deeper problem, the corruption of the social sciences. But I said this before. Jim Devine -Original Message- From: andie nachgeborenen [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tue 5/18/2004 6:45 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Subject: Re: [PEN-L] game theory Nash went mad, but you can't argue with his maths. you can easily argue about the applicability of the math. Math doesn't correspond to reality; it only represents the abstract dimension. By the way, Nash is currently deemed sane. And his sanity or insanity has nothing to do with the validity of the Nash equilibrium concept or of game theory. I actually knew Nash a bit when he was mad. The math majors at Tigetown called him the Ghost of Fine Hall. He would scrawl brilliant and bitingly hilarious formulae on the blackboards -- not at all like the merely wacko stuff depicted in the movie, much funnier. Political too. And not right wing. Apparently he hated Nixon. That wasn't hard, of course. My friend (at the time, haven't been in touch in years) Dave Donoho, now a hotshot stat prof at Stanford, said that mathematically Nash's crazy formulae _almost_ made sense. Sorry I teed you off about your post on madness, but frankly I was surprised to read your remarks about GT in the context of the Westlake book and your substantive post -- reread them yourself and see if you can see how someone might understand the point the way I did. Of course I know it's easy to be misconstrued, having had it happy to me a lot. But as a lawyer I've learned to assume that it's not necessarily the other guy's fault -- something I for one at least didn't learn as an academic. Maybe you have, but if so, given that you know how hard it to be clear and how easy it is to me misunderstood, maybe it would be helpful to be less uptight about being misunderstood even if it is the other guy's fault. For instance, not that I am a shining examplar of anything, I said about eight times in my post that GT was an abstraction, an idealization, and based on false premises, and yet apparently I still wasn't clear enough. Still, it's not worth getting mad about . . . . jks __ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! - Internet access at a great low price. http://promo.yahoo.com/sbc/ __ Do you Yahoo!? SBC Yahoo! - Internet access at a great low price. http://promo.yahoo.com/sbc/
Re: game theory
I think it is bizarre to ask whether game theory is evil, or (as Jim Divine suggests) whether it makes you crazy, or comes from paranoid schizophrenia, or something like that. Nash went mad, but you can't argue with his maths. The prisoner's dilemma and the Nash equilibrium are two of the very greatest -- maybe the very greatest -- results in social theory in the 20th century. GT is an extremely powerful and beautiful set of mathematical tools that has a wide application in thinking about society, particularly in competitive situations, which of course is really important if you are an economist whose job it is to understand capitalism, or a political scientist who wants to understand international/world politics. It involves abstractions and idaelizations, of course,a nd people are really like that -- duh -- in this theory, as someone who used an important precursor of it once said, men are mere bearers of social relations. People are working are the complsxifications with, in my area, e.g., behavioral law and economics. But that it still poorly understood and litle developed, and will never have the elegant simplicity of game theory. The theory, like most theories, rests on assumptions taht are technically false. But it is powerful and predictive theory, and the problem with it from the left is just that it should be allowed to become ideology, that is assumed to be about invariant human nature in all times and places regardless of circumstances. Besides the theory is useful to the left in lots of ways. For example, the PD is a real kick in the teeth to the Panglossian assumptions of Gen Equil Theory, which says that rational self interested actors will give us The Best Of All Possible Worlds. vary the assumprions just a tad, from Arrow to von Neumann, and you can prove as a theorem that it aint so, that the resulst will be suboptimal, and you need to change the incentiveds truicture (that is, society) or human nature to make things come out right. How can the left not rejoice in this demonstration? jks --- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I wrote: this is an excellent statement of the game-theoretic way of thinking, seen in its starkest way in the kind of paranoia that characterized John Nash. It also points to the often-unnoted psychic costs of thinking that way. Ted Winslow writes: The delusional aspect concerns a great deal more than paranoid delusions about the intentions of others e.g. the conception of self and others as calculating machines, the complete inability to take account of and understand cultural distinctiveness, etc., etc. I wouldn't say that game theory itself is necessarily paranoid. Nor does it necessarily involve conceiving people as calculating machines, totally abstracting from cultural distinctiveness. (Due to lack of time, I won't comment on the etc. or the other etc.) Just as in mainstream economics, there are differences of opinion among game theory practitioners about what game theory is and how it should be used. (I rely on Hargreaves-Heap and Varoufakis, _ Game theory: a critical introduction_ (Routledge, 1995), David Kreps, _Game Theory and Economic Modeling_, and William Poundstone's _Prisoner's Dilemma_). I'm not an expert on game theory (and I've never even played one on TV). But I think that the bad stuff that Ted associates with game theory might best be associated with John Nash, John Von Neumann, and the Cold War RAND culture that decided that GT was a cool tool. I've never found game theory to be very useful in my research; nor does it seem very harmful. A lot of it seems like an academic game. My feeling is that its main harm comes when people reify it and use it as an ideological weapon, as some of the RANDites did. I'd blame this dark side of the GT force much more on the Cold War than on GT itself. And I blame the Cold War on... but I digress. I would agree with Ted that we should reject Nash equilibrium except as an abstract notion that might (in some circumstances) provide a useful contrast with reality. It's very similar to the macro (and bogus) concept of rational expectations: people expect the economy to produce the results the model predicts it will produce and so act on these expectations. Thus, in equilibrium the model produces what they expect (always assuming that the economy = the model). (RatEx says people's expectations work this way on average; Nash equilibrium is _defined_ as having them work exactly.) But the idea of Nash equilibrium and GT don't necessarily say that people are calculating machines. It could be interpreted as saying that in certain circumstances (in games) people act _as if_ they were calculating machines -- or that people might be assumed to act this way as a first approximation to reality (simplifying reality in order to try to understand it). In certain oligopolistic market situations, profit-seeking firms[*] are pushed to act in
Re: Bush apology?
George I (of England) spoke no English at all. I don't know how articulate he was in German. --- Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Devine, James wrote: all I noticed was that the King (who speaks English as a second language) seemed more articulate than the Pres. I guess standards vary among hereditary monarchs. Doug __ Do you Yahoo!? Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at Yahoo! HotJobs http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/careermakeover
Re: imperalist booty
No, I think it's based on a confusion between the moral and explanatory dimensions of value theory. I think that advocates of this position think that we cannot attack imperialism against the third world unless we say that what is wrong with it is theft, on the analogy that what is wrong with capitalist exploitation of workers is supposed to be theft -- unearned expropriation of what the workers produce. Although it is controversial, Marx of course never regarded the appropriation and redistribution of surplus value, by itself, as wrong. He never thought that the workers deserved what they produced because they produced it. He thought profits arose from the capitalists appropriating the surplus over what the workers needed to live, but such redistribution requires something else other than the mere fact that something goes from a producer to a nonproducer to be the basis for a criticism. Otherwise those unable tow work would be entitled to nothing, and he expressly insists on their being provided for. The fact of the matter is that there is a lot of be said by way of attacking imperialism against the third world even if it it had no effect, or a negative effect, on first world capitalist profits. It's unjust and creates unnecessary inequality (Marx would not like that, too bad for him); it's oppressive and destroys freedom and fosters misery, it subverts democracy and promotes war. So there are a lot of good reasons to oppose it even if the the first world is not mainly rich because it exploits the third world. If the concern is not moral but explanatory -- which, given the heated rhetoric of advocates I do not believe, that one cannot account for why imperialism occurs unless it is the source of first world wealth, that is a fallacy. Even if one insisted that a materialist explanation must be economic, all you would have to say is that imperialism against the third world occurs because it is _a_ source of profits for the first world; it would not have to be the chief or primary source of profits. Indeed, it would not have to be net-profitable, as long as the losses in terms of the cost could be palmed on on others, e.g., the workers through taxes for defense, the deficit, etc. But in fact I think that a materialist explanation need not be economic in this sense and that actual imperialist activities in the third world often can be shown to have other bases than making profits. Vietnam is a big counterexample; attempts to make it out as a corporate grab for Southeast Asian natural resources were not persuasive, and the Pentagon's Paper's conclusion that it was largely about prestige in the cold war rings true. Likewise the wars against Nicaragua and Cuba -- here Chomsky's talk of the threat of a good example is more plausible. The US ruling classes definitely do not want successful paths of independent development with freedom and prosperity. Ultimately they may worry that this would threaten their profits, but that's quite indirect. They don't really stand to make money squashing Nicaragua, probably the reverse, and the Cuba embargo may help ADM but hurts the oil companies and the sugar ones. One might go one, but there are many reasons why the US commits imperialist acts, and the profit motive enters as a constraining background factor in most of them, rather than as a direct motivation. jks --- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: [was: RE: [PEN-L] The new Iraqi Flag ( imperialist booty)] Doug writes: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. The assertion seems to be based on the implicit assumption that first-world workers don't produce surplus-value. Nor do other workers, so that the whole story is one of redistribution between regions (unequal exchange, looting, etc.) (gonna shake some imperialist booty!) Jim D. __ Do you Yahoo!? Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at Yahoo! HotJobs http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/careermakeover
Re: The Jesus Factor
Virtuous, isn't it, not (just) chaste. Lord, make me virtuous - but not yet. ... This from a dim recollection, and I am too lazy too look it up. jks --- joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yes, in the Confessions. Joanna Carrol Cox wrote: Doesn't Augustine say somewhere something like, Oh Lord, make me chaste, but not too soon? Carrol __ Do you Yahoo!? Win a $20,000 Career Makeover at Yahoo! HotJobs http://hotjobs.sweepstakes.yahoo.com/careermakeover
Re: Bush, the lesser evil?
Or, more to the point, whether Johnson or Goldwater won in 64. Kerry may get stuck as a Johnson unless he finds a face-saving exit, fighting an unwinnable war he didn't believe in. We can quote his own best line at him. But the war apart, LBJ presided over The Great Society, the expansion of the welfare state, appointed the real Warren Court, gave us the 1964 Civil Rights Act (Title VII) and the Voting Rights Act, a tolerably decent NLRB, and aggressive desegregation policies -- just for starters. I don't minimize his crimes, but there were real differences between Johnson and Goldwater, awful as LBJ's foreign policy was. Maybe these didn't justify Part of the way with LBJ in 1964 or early '68, and Kerry's no LBJ. Hell, Kerry makes Nixon look like a red. But the total balance of the decision can't rest on just the war policy. jks --- Mike Ballard [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Chris, Does this mean that you don't think it mattered whether FDR or one of his Republican opponents became President in the 30s and 40s? Cheers, Mike B) --- Chris Burford [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Louis Proyect effectively demonstrates how the concept of the lesser evil becomes nonsense, even on the most pragmatic opportunist tactical level, as two bourgeois candidates for President, and their supporters, circle round each other, trying to avoid giving the other side opportunity for attack. = Love and freedom are vital to the creation and upbringing of a child. Sylvia Pankhurst http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Photos: High-quality 4x6 digital prints for 25¢ http://photos.yahoo.com/ph/print_splash __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Photos: High-quality 4x6 digital prints for 25¢ http://photos.yahoo.com/ph/print_splash
Re: Happy Easter!
When I lived in Kalamzoo, Mich. in the late 80s, we would see a sign on the road to Ann Arbor (which we visited often, K being what it was), advertising a Christian motel: Prepare to meet thy God! was the slogan. Hmmm, that's inviting. On the North shore of Chicago is a hopital called Resurrection Health Care (when ordinary medicare service just won't do!). jks --- Carrol Cox [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Devine, James wrote: notes from life in Southern California: I remember from the '30s a sign in a yard in the village of Millburg, Michigan: Repent ye and therefore be saved Electrical Repairing Did Carrol __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - File online by April 15th http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: [Fwd: corporate felons]
Have you checked with Russell Mokhiber's Corporate Crime Reporter? http://www.corporatecrimereporter.com/ jks --- paul phillips [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I am forwarding a couple of messages Fred Lee circulated on his post keynesian list that I thought would be equally of interest to those on pen-l. Paul Phillips Original Message --- Forwarded message follows --- Subject:corporate felons Date sent: Fri, 9 Apr 2004 12:52:48 -0500 From: Lee, Frederic To: Dear Colleagues, Fred Schiff would like info on corporate felons--see his request below. If you have any info for him, please e-mail it to him. His e-mail address is [EMAIL PROTECTED] Fred Lee I'm [Fred Schiff] doing a series of half-hour news and public affairs shows. My journalism students are producing radio, television and online stories. My part is to do an interview segment where I try to add the depth and context that is usually missing in the commercial news media. Is there anyone on the heterodox listserv who can help us with a story we are trying to concerning the pattern or extent of indictments of upper management of American corporations? Any who may have collected an inventory or chronological timeline listing of these indictments from the past four years. We're especially interested in opinions and interpretation of the class-wide nature of corporate felons, particularly within the so-called inner circle of leading banks and the Business Roundtable. Thanks, Fred --- End of forwarded message --- __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Tax Center - File online by April 15th http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: From Your Friends at Dissent
Chris Doss [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Zinn reduces the past to a Manichean fable and makes no serious attempt to address the biggest question a leftist can ask about U.S. history: why have most Americans accepted the legitimacy of the capitalist republic in which they live? -- What's so daunting about that question? Don't most people accept the legitimacy of whatever social system they are socialized in, provided it is stable? I'm also not sure that Z doesn't make an attempt to answer this question. It's just that he had no particularly startlingly new answers, just the usual ones, right? Racism, ethnic division, repression and cooption of radical organizing, individualist ideology, backwards labor laws, the lack of a labor party and the historical attachment of the main part of the labor movement to the Democratic Party, etc., first past the post winner-take-all elections, big money in politics, etc. We all know know this stiff, it's just that it's not really obvious what to do about it. Zinn talks about all this stuff. It is true that his main task, as he takes it in the PHUS is to delegitimate official ideologies by attacking the idea that American history is the the story of the shining city on the hill. I consider myself a patriot, and I even admire a lot of aspects of American elite history, but I'm not offended by Zinn's deflationary approach, and it mystifies my why many self-styled social democrats and liberals are. It's not at all in the same category as raving about fascist Amerikkka. Besides, far as I know no one really questions Zinn's accuracy and scholarship except for an incidental detail here and there, isn't that right? Sparking of which, let me put in a nother plug, for New Yorkers and those living nearby, for the Broadway production of Stephen Sondheim's Assassins, _now open and running,_ the only musical ever made about people who have assasissinated or attempted to assassinate Presidents of the US. It's about the dark side of the American dream. One chorus is called The Other National Anthem. The good guy in show, the only one who offers a trace of hope or an alternative to desperation, murder, or resignation, failure, and lies, is Emma Goldman. Sondheim's no Marxist or anarchist, but this show is very much in our ball park. The music is beautiful and the songs are great. Check it out. jks --- __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Small Business $15K Web Design Giveaway http://promotions.yahoo.com/design_giveaway/
Re: Mike Davis on the Democratic Party
This is a really excellent book, great on why the working class in this country is so divided. jks --- Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: For my money, the best book ever written on the Democrats is by Mike Davis. Although it appeared in 1986 and examined the failure of the Mondale candidacy, many of the themes are relevant to today's situation as should be obvious from the following excerpt I scanned in. Unfortunately, nothing by Davis on the Democratic Party can be found online. I do recommend that you track down his book Prisoners of the American Dream, which is still in print. - The Lesser Evil? The Left, The Democrats and 1984 In the summer before the 1984 presidential elections, Michael Harrington and Irving Howe, in a widely noted interview in the New York Times Magazine, boasted that 'by now practically everyone on the Left agrees that the Democratic Party, with all its faults, must be our main political arena'. In recent historical context there was a peculiar irony in this assertion, with its smug self-limitation of the 'Left'. During the 1960s, American social democracy had been debilitated, almost discredited, by its advocacy of reform through the Democratic Party. The right wing of the old Thomasite Socialist Party, 'Social Democrats, USA', had broken away to become courtiers of Scoop Jackson and lobbyists for military victory in Vietnam. Meanwhile, a centrist current led by Harrington and Howe formed a small circle around Dissent with negligible influence on a burgeoning New Left which spurned their faith in the transformability of the Democratic Party. Indeed, the key radical organizations of the 1960s, SNCC and SDS, understandably regarded the Cold War liberalism incarnated by the Humphrey/Jackson wing of the Democratic Party (to which both camps of social democrats oriented) as the enemy, primarily responsible for genocidal imperialism in Southeast Asia as well as for the repression of the Black liberation movement at home. From the McGovern candidacy of 1972, however, sections of the former New Left, together with a younger cohort of 1970s activists, began to slip back into Democratic politics, initially on a local level. At first there was no sharp ideological break with the sixties' legacy. The 'New Polities', as it was typed, seemed just another front of the anti-war movement or another tactical extension of the urban populism espoused by SDS's community organizing faction. By 1975, with the sudden end of the Vietnam War, a strategic divergence had become more conspicuous. On the one hand, an array of self-proclaimed 'cadre' groups, inspired by the heroic mold of 1930s radicalism, were sending their ex-student members into the factories in the hope of capturing and radicalizing the widespread rank-and-file discontent that characterized the end of the postwar boom. On the other hand, another network of ex-SDSers and antiwar activists - of whom Tom Hayden was merely a belated and media-hyped example - were building local influence within the Democratic 'reform movement': the loose collocation of consumer, environmental and public-sector groups, supported by a few progressive unions, that had survived the McGovern debacle. Although its significance was only vaguely grasped at the time, this increasing polarization between workerism and electoralism coincided with, and was immediately conditioned by, the decline of the Black liberation movement that had been the chief social motor of postwar radicalism. A dismaying, inverse law seemed to prevail between the collapse of grassroots mobilization in the ghettoes and the rise of the first wave of Black political patronage in the inner cities. While Black revolutionaries and nationalists were being decimated by J. Edgar Hoover's COINTELPRO program of preemptive repression and infiltration, Black community organization was being reshaped into a passive clientelism manipulated by the human-services bureaucracy and the Democratic Party. Although, as we have seen, the civil rights movement remained an unfinished revolution with an urgent agenda of economic and political demands, its centrality to the project of a popular American left was tragically, and irresponsibly, obscured in the late 1970s. The ranks of the white, ex-student left, preoccupied with academic outposts and intellectual celebrities, showed a profound inability to understand the strategic implications of the halting of the civil rights movement. For all the theoretical white smoke of the 1970s, including the endless debates on crisis theory and the nature of the state, the decisive problem of the fate of the Second Reconstruction was displaced beyond the field of vision. With minimal challenge or debate, leading journals like Socialist Review and Dissent tacitly demoted Black liberation - the critical democratic issue in American history -
Re: Socialist Scholars Conference - reply to Justin
Your are aiming this at the wrong guy. I do not despair because the workers do not respond to the call of a Leninist Party the way you suggest I think they should. I am in any case opposed to the Bolshevik model. As I have said here many times, I am a lowercase liberal democrat. I mentioned the differences from 1917 because someone mentioned 1917 as a situation where beforehand it didn't look like there was going to be change. I ssid it was different from now. That does not imply that I hold 1917 up as a standard, model, or ideal. I don't. I have no a priori notion of what a revolutionary moment or situation is. I just know what whatever a revolutionary movement is, this isn't it. I don't see the greater organization and flexibility you see. Maybe this is an artifact of my being in the US. I am glad you are full of hope and cheer. I myself am being driven back with pitchforks to support John Kerry in the dismal hope that he will restore the usual level of horror and slow the rate of destruction. If I am too pessimistic, no one has explained to me why. The consensus that has emerged from this discussion is that we should not think to hard about the odds or the future, but should just keep fighting. I suppose we must, but it does seem like trying to empty the ocean with a sieve. jks --- Jurriaan Bendien [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Justin wrote: 1. In my opinion, this entire perspective depends on a prior decontextualised idea or definition of what a revolutionary movement means, or what it should be like. 2. But why should workingclass people, radical middleclass people, black people, hispanics, poor people, farmers etc. always organise the same way ? 3. As far as I can see, those people are nowadays more organised and more conscious than they were ever before, and also have much greater behavioural flexibility than before. Maybe dogmatic Marxists cannot see it, but I can. I can prove it with very objective indicators as well. 4. It's refreshing to me, that they have thrown out a bunch of methods that didn't work, anyway. I hope they keep doing that, too. Why stick with methods that don't work, that aren't successful ? 5. The pessimism is an artifact of a certain mentality, a certain way of thinking, which has nothing much to do with objective reality. It's a mood, and moods change. The pessimism grows out of an incapacity, but the incapacity itself grows out of an unwillingness to change thinking, and try something new, to consider a point of view that makes success possible. SNIP __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Socialist Scholars Conference - reply to Justin
--- dave dorkin [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I sympathize with you Justin. I returned to live in the US from abroad and I think that might have something to do with your pessimism (especially if you frequent certain circles for work etc) Still, there are plenty of improvements even in the US over the last 40 years here is an excerpt from Chomsky: I am not saying everything is going to hell in a handbasket, there is no improvement, we have made no progress, it's just like 1900, that we are doomed, or any such thing. There have been improvements. Some have been considerable. I would not overstate matters; the backlash has been considerable at a time when in most of the country it is fatal for a politician to say that he is a liberal. Nonetheless, my point was circumscribed. I am saying that the prospects for what people here are calling revolutionary socialism, the replacement of capitalism by something better, are very dim because there sre no organized forces pushing for that, and because capital is verys trong, resiliant, and flexible. jks __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Socialist Scholars Conference - reply to Justin
I was far more able to travel abroad as an academic than I am as lawyer. And I am talking about hopes for my country. I am aware that people in Other Countries are doing better than we are here. jks --- Yoshie Furuhashi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Dave wrote: I sympathize with you Justin. I returned to live in the US from abroad and I think that might have something to do with your pessimism (especially if you frequent certain circles for work etc) Now that Justin is a rich lawyer, his career as a poor professor of philosophy derailed by the politics of academia, he should take a break and travel abroad, which I think will reinvigorate his political spirits more than any PEN-pals can. -- Yoshie * Bring Them Home Now! http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/ * Calendars of Events in Columbus: http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html, http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php, http://www.cpanews.org/ * Student International Forum: http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/ * Committee for Justice in Palestine: http://www.osudivest.org/ * Al-Awda-Ohio: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio * Solidarity: http://www.solidarity-us.org/ __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: there's no hope?
As I said: my point was circumscribed. I am saying that the prospects for what people here are calling revolutionary socialism [RS], the replacement of capitalism by something better, are very dim . . . Since you ask, I don't see _immediate_ hope for reform either. Do you? jks --- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Justin/Andie writes: I am not saying everything is going to hell in a handbasket, there is no improvement, we have made no progress, it's just like 1900, that we are doomed, or any such thing. There have been improvements. Some have been considerable. I would not overstate matters; the backlash has been considerable at a time when in most of the country it is fatal for a politician to say that he is a liberal. Nonetheless, my point was circumscribed. I am saying that the prospects for what people here are calling revolutionary socialism [RS], the replacement of capitalism by something better, are very dim because there sre no organized forces pushing for that, and because capital is verys trong, resiliant, and flexible. I (and others) have argued that the same tactics and strategies that aim to promote RS -- i.e., grass-roots organizing -- are best at promoting reforms within the system. Are you saying that reforms are impossible too? BTW, the situation is clearly very bad in the US (despite Spain's rejection of Bushit). But we should remember the way in which people like Sweezy Magdoff survived the 1950s... Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Observations on the Socialist Scholars Conference
There is nothing wrong with not being interested in revolutionary socialism -- few in the United States are. Leftists who are not interested in revolutionary socialism should ask the questions that really interest them. It takes genuine interest in a subject to come up with useful thoughts about it. -- Yoshie Yoshie, please suggest a useful thought, then. This is a genuine question. I'm kind of at the end of my rope. jks __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Observations on the Socialist Scholars Conference
It takes genuine interest in a subject to come up with useful thoughts about it. -- Yoshie Yoshie, please suggest a useful thought, then. This is a genuine question. I'm kind of at the end of my rope. jks Use, after all, is a topic of practice. Useful for what? Useful for whom? -- Yoshie It was your terms, useful, so I thought you meant something by it. I'd like somethging useful for me, of course, or useful for Solidarity, or useful for people on this list, or useful for people who are trying to engage in activities that promote socialism, or even abstractly, useful to the working classes. Maybe you meant something different or had a different target audience. I'd be happy to hear something that would be useful about RS for whoever. Right now, like Doug and Bill Lear and Michael Perkman many here, I see very little hope, not only for RS, but for reformism, or eveb for maintaining the last shreds of the New Deal/Great Society -- and this whether or not the Dems regain the Prez or Congressional majorities. I do not expect to have Social Security or Medicare, for example. Lou sees hope in ninth graders calling him up about Cuba. Well, it's better that they are interested in that than not. David Schweickart tells me his students are hungry to hear about Marx. Maybe we are just in a trough. That's good, but is it a movement for RS? Maybe I am just tired and disillusioned. Maybe there are encouraging signs happening all around me and I am not seeing them. Please show them to me. jks __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Observations on the Socialist Scholars Conference
Are we playing burden of proof here? What on earth is your point? I can think of lots of good things to do. Given my time, I defend habeas cases pro bono, go to NLG meetings, volunteer with the ACLU as a cooperating attorney, gove talks on the Patriot Act, participate as a legal observer at marches, occasionally write left wing philosophy, particvipate in these discussions. Does this advance the replacement of capiatlsim by socialism? Does it bring it any closer? It's hard to believe that it does. It isa lso hard to think of anything that I could do tahtw ould be more effective. What activities do you think it is worth engaging in? -- __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Observations on the Socialist Scholars Conference
I tried that, lost my job, now I am a lawyer. --- joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yoshie Furuhashi wrote: Suppose that you are really interested in the subject of revolutionary socialism. What questions about it do you think would be worth asking in the United States today, when no one -- the least of all, revolutionary socialists -- envisions any revolution happening today or any time soon? -- Question: Is there any way to prepare the ground? Can we take notes from the methods of the fundamentalists and say, infiltrate the educational system? Can we take the most intelligent, well educated, committed people we have and commit a generation of them to educating many generations of students ...not to indoctrinate them, but to make them aware that there can be many futures and to give them the skills to organize themselves and articulate their vision of a socialist ...human future? Joanna __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Observations on the Socialist Scholars Conference
Yes, yes, who was it who said that before they happen revolutions seem impossible, afterwards they seem inevitable. The fall of Communism was like that too. Nonetheless there are certain obvious differences between 1917 and now, like the existence of mass working class radical movements of the left and the far left, and a history of revolutionary struggle that shook the government within living memory, and socialist parties that were not mere infinitesmal cults, and a whole lotta other stuff, including a weak and hapless ruling class and a rigid and inflexible state structure. None of that exists now. Of course we may be surprised -- pleasantly, I mean. But it would be a big surprise. --- Jurriaan Bendien [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: about two months before the Russian revolution Lenin apparently wrote to Krupskaya and said that they were not being able to see any socialist revolution in their lifetime! That's true as far as I know. Roman Rosdolsky actually published a really interesting piece on this topic, about the role of the individual in relation to revolutionary processes (in Kritik). Unfortunately it is in German, I haven't translated it. I have a copy of it somewhere, I'll post the ref later. Relax don't do it When you want to go to it Relax don't do it When you want to come Relax don't do it When you want to come When you want to come - Frankie goes to Hollywood, Relax. __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Observations on the Socialist Scholars Conference
Isn't talk of revolutionary socialism today faintly ridiculous? I mean, it can help make you feel identified with certain traditions, heroes, heroines, historical events -- probably practically it remains what it was before the Fall, an statement taht one puts one self as opposed to all those wihsay washy Democrats and Social Democrats and in the tradition of what can be salvaged from the very early years of the October Revolution and the Left Opposition to Stalinism. Maybe once that made sense, when Stalinism was a pole of attraction, when ordinary workers cared about the October Revolution. But today? It's not that October is no longer important, but it is not an inspiration or a name of conjure with -- rtaher the contarry, insofar as western workers even think about it; half of the names a ssociated with L.P.'s Classical Marxism have no resonance whatsoever with most people (Gramsi? Luxemberg? Who dat?), and the others are regarded by workers in the West as more or less Bad (Lenin, Trostky). More deeply, we have no revolutionary working class movements or parties, least of all does the struggle take the classical Marxist forms. Oh, I grant that Casto is hanging on by his teeth and eyebrows, and inspiration to a handful and probably a blessing to most Cubans as long as they don't get too vocally skeptical. And there's Chavez, but he is hardly a classical Marxist. My point is not that there is no resistance or struggle, obvously there is, but its' anything like what people used to think of classical revolutionary socialism. I'd also note the transparant fact that if we had Northern-Tier European social democracy, we'd think the revolution was over, and we'd won. But in fact we haven't even got a reformist movement to attain those goals, much less a revolutionary movement to overthrow capital and out the wotkers in the driver's seat. So what sense does it make to proclaim revolutionary socialism today? Am I being too heavy on the pessimism of the mind here? Please show me I am, wrong. No trumpets please, or denunciations of my flagging faith. Trumpets hurt my ears, and I acknowledge the dispiritedness. jks --- Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Michael Hoover wrote: re. above persons, i've read them (most several times at least) and lots of others as well, surely revolutionary socialism involves more than reading list, how might these contribute to revolutionary socialism today It's interesting that all the authors cited are long dead. They wrote in the time when there were mass socialist parties and capitalism had little legitimacy with the working class. Today things are very different. Do we just quote the classics at the masses and hope they have an aha! experience or what? Doug __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Observations on the Socialist Scholars Conference
--- k hanly [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I always took revolutionary socialism to mean the complete overthrow of capitalism and its replacement by a mode of production that involves some sort of socialised ownership of the means of production distribution and exchange plus production on the basis of need not profit. So I guess as a longtime market socialist I was never a RS. But I like my historical account better than your abstract definition. Be that as it may, while I think that replacing capiatlism by some form of socialized ownership is an admirable goal (even if I would not go so far as getting rid of markets), there is a sort of scholastic flavor to variations on this formula at the present time, don't you think? Revolutionary socialism contrasts with reformist socialism that believes in changing capitalism so as to socialise certain aspects of the system to distribute wealth and power somewhat more equitably and tomake capitalism more responsive to the needs of everyone and specifically the worst off e.g. universal healthcare, minimum wages, environmental controls, etc etc. but not doing away with the private property in the means of production or with profit as an engine of production. Well, as I said, if we in the US had what they have in Sweden or the Netherlands, we'd think we had won. And certianly it would be a great victory. But even that seems hopeless utopian just now. Today my 14 yr old daughter was marveling that in Europe they have subsized healthcare, education, and pensions, and wondering why Americans didn't demand these things. I have her a short version of the standard answer -- no labor party, racism, ethnic diversity, the frontier, no anti-feudal struggles, but the fact of the matter is that we would be far luckier than we have any right to expect to gets a struggle for what ytou call reformist socialism in the US. At one time perhaps reformism itself shared the goals of revolutionary socialism but that is hardly the case with any actually existing reformist socialist parties. The aims of revolutionary socialism certainly are not part of the consciousness of most working people nor are there any powerful social movements that clearly have as their end revolutionary socialism but that hardly means that talk of revolutionary socialism is at all ridiculous, even faintly. Because? I really do want an answer. I used to think I was an RS. I gave up a career and a lot of years to that ideal. Now I seem to have lost touch with what ir could mean. Certainly some of the rhetoric of radical revolutionary grouplets may be more than faintly ridiculous or groupies of the likes of Kim Il Sung II but that hardly discredits the aims of revolutionary socialists. All it does is show that certain strategies and tactics are not likely to be successful in the present context. So what struggles are likely to be successful? My boringly sane group Solidarity has been stuck at about 30 people since I joined it some 16 years ago. I am not sure what Justin means when he says that the struggle does not take classical Marxist forms. I mean that if you proclaim yourself a Marxist, blazon hammers snd sickles and red flags and quotes from the Marxist classics all over the place, no one will listen to you. Once that was not so. Now it is, and it seems unlikely to change. The classical Marxist form par excellence is the class struggle. Oh class struggle is real. Marxist theory is prettuy much true. But this truth dare not speak its name. You know that. . You mean this form has been superceded? No, the langauge, symbols, and vocabulary of Marxism have been irredeemably poisoned. Or dated. I am not sure which is worse. And on and on. Surely any revolutionary socialists would struggle against these developments as part of their tactical activity no matter what their strategies might be. Reformists too. And left-liberals. I have no idea what Classical Marxism is supposed to mean. Marxism-Leninism seems to be included. Is Maoism classical Marxism? Is Kautsky a Classical Marxist? Marx once said he was not a Marxist, maybe that is because he was a classical Marxist!!! Louis speaks of authors who are guides as to what is revolutionary socialism not classical marxism. In fact Louis does not include Marx in his list.. Not my term, Louis's. But I think it means Marxist writers who can be appropriated for broadly anti-Stalinist ideals without breaking too much with orthodoxy. Benjamim is NOT a classical Marxist. As far as what constitutes revolutionary socialism, I'd say that the answer to that is in the writings of Lenin, Trotsky, Che Guevara, Rosa Luxemburg, Mariategui, CLR James and others too numerous to mention. Yeah, buncha folk who mostly died at least 50 years ago . . . Depressively, jks __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: RS
If what precedes is accurate at all, then the denial by some on this list of hope for the emergence of a revolutionary socialist movement is _also_ the denial of any hope for more than trivial reforms for the indefinite future. No revolutionary movement(s), no substantial change for the better under capitalism. The thought has occurred to me. History is full of surprises. But I don't see any revolutionary movement or forces that might generate one underway in the foreseeable future. I do not say this with any joy. jks __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Corporations
Wrong in the sense lacking explanatory power. David S.and I are conducting a fairly austerely nonmoral discussion about the nature and proper explanation of the corporation. jks --- Jurriaan Bendien [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: that investors find the limitation of liability an attractive feature. What is wrong with that view? Wrong in what sense - moral culpability, economic benefits or private interest ? The search in on for new legal forms to offload costs and losses. LLCs provide tax and managerial advantages. J. __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: What is this thing called love?
pish tosh! bah humbug! you sentimentalists! all you need to remember is the words of the sister: what's love but a second hand emotion? It's physical Only logical You must try to ignore That it means more than that ;-) If you look at What Is This Thing Called Love, it's not exactly sentimental. Here is the full lyric: I was a hum-drum person Leading a life apart When love flew in through my window wide And quickened my hum-drum heart Love flew in thorugh my window I was so happy then But after love had stayed a little while Love flew out again What is this thing called love? This funny thing called love? Just who can solve its mystery? Why should it make a fool of me? I saw you there one wonderful day You took my heart and threw it away Thats why I ask the lawd in heaven above What is this thing called love? You gave me days of sunshine You gave me nights of cheer You made my life an enchanted dream til somebody else came near Somebody else came near you I felt the winters chill And now I sit and wonder night and day Why I love you still? Porter is prety cold-eyed about love, which was my point to Joanna. He's the fella that wrote Love For Sale, among others. Btw he does have a song called: It's A Chemical Reaction, That's All! --ravi p.s: kindness and caring. that's what counts. ;-) __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
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. Ah, Joanna. What can one say to this? Here's one of my my chief Authorities on love, Cole Porter: What is this thing called love? This funny thing called love? Just who can solve its mystery? Why should it make a fool of me? I saw you there one wonderful day You took my heart and threw it away Thats why I ask the Lord in Heaven above What is this thing called love? For a lot of purposes and with most people, wouldn't a simple arms-length contract be better? jks __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Corporations
Yes, but it is only with respect to non-contractual liabilities that the limitation is state imposed. I disagree. First, a contract is state imposition or creation. A contract, in law, is a promise the law will enforce. Second, the limited libaility accorded corporations is a matter of the corporate form, not of contract. It is not contracted for, but is a creature of the legal process of incorporation. Third, there are lots of kinds of non-contractual, non-tort liability that incorporation offers limited protection against. The contractual limited liability is, by definition, a matter of contract. As I initially said, the other party to the contract can bargain for a personal guarantee, which is very common. That has nothing to do with the nature of incorporation. I don't disagree, except that if you remove the issue of limited liability, a corporation is ultimately reducible to a series of contracts, just like any other social group. Not all social groups are contractual and voluntary. I am not a Jew in virtue of an agreement. Nor is the working class, etc., or members thereof, (in) that clas because of a contract. Moreover, saying take away limited liability, and a corpration is just . . . is to remove the essence of thing. The state recognized entity (the corporation) is a way to simpliy the transaction costs of these relationships. Transactions cost analysis has its place in explaining why the firm/market boundaries fall where they do -- indeed in a planned system, in explaining the firm/firm boundaries. But you have not said why TCA explains why some firms are limited liability entities -- that there are corporations. The obviosu explnataion is the simple and natural one, that investors find the limitation of liability an attractive feature. What is wrong with that view? I don't claim expertise in this area, and can be persuaded. I see from a quick persusal; of my limited library of corprate law that Easterbrook and Fishel seem to be in your court on the relevance of TCA, and while I don't defer to them blindly (to say the least) I recognize that they have real learning in the area, and I don't. So I will look at what they say and report back. This is not correct. It is possible to have the corporate form without limited liability. Not under any law of which I am aware, though I might be wrong. As I said before, the limitation of contractual liability can be a matter of contract (I promise to sell you widgets, but if I breach the agreement, you agree to cap your claim at X.). The ultimate benefit of the corporate form is transaction costs -- for a variety of reasons, partnerships have major disadvantages compared to corporations which are unrelated to limited liability. For instance, what happens if one of the partners dies or wants to leave the partnership? Can one partner bind all the other partners? Who has authority to speak on behalf of the partnership? The corporate form addresses these and other problems in a very effective fashion. Well, yes. But there are limited liability partnerships now. I work for one. I don't know why you bring up strict liability -- The point is that owner responsiblity for the acts of an employee is strict liability. Well, that's an interesting idea. A different interpretation is that if the employee acts as an agent of the owner, the owner is liable through agency principles rather than withouta shwoing of fault. That is, the fault is there -- it was in the agent's actions, but the principle is responsible. Negligent horing, supervision, is something different from responsibility for thetorts of the agent. As I was thinking about it, another major consequence of the removal of limited liability would be to dramatically shrink the size of the corporation. In other words, large corporations would probably fragment into a multitude of independent corporations to ensure that one division is not liable for the acts of another division. No doubt. I suppose that would be a good thing if you are a Lefty, because that would decentralize corporate power. However, it would significantly increase transaction costs. Not all lefties think small is beautiful per se. Small capital can be more vicious to workers than big capital, truth be told. The Small Business Assn is well to the right of the NAM, I think. Right now this is a big division in VA, where big capital in the state GOP supports higher taxes because public services in the state are in the toilet, and small capital, also in the GOP, is maintaining the anti-tax faith. jks jks __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Corporations/Side Issue
This threatens to lapse into the dreaded market socialism debate. I do not want to get into that, and Michael won't allow it anyway. I will just say here, very briefly, that we do not know, but (a) the case of Mondragon is not so bad, and is unlike the others, and (b) there may be a difference between attempts to create a worker-controlled island in a capitalist sea, and the operation of worker-controlled enterprisers (whether corporations or other enterprise forms) where there is no or little wage labor, and they are the dominant form. I should mention (c) that at least one possible form of a worker-controlled enterprise is one in which the workers are not wage laborers but cooperators whose remuneration takes the form of a profit share rather than a wage. In my opinion, if something like a socialist market economy won't be stable and better than capitalism, then capitalist social democracy on the Western European model is the best we can do. For reasons you can look up in the PEN-L archives where I and othersd have discussed the issues, or can read in books -- I won't discuss them here -- I don't think that a nonmarket econimy would be either stable or better. But leave the point be. We are not faced today in America with a choice of any of these alternatives. If we could get social democracy, we'd think the revolution was over and we'd won. But it as utopian from where we stand as Marx's communism. jks --- Mike Ballard [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: --- andie nachgeborenen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Moreover one could imagibe a market society where, for eaxmple, the corporations did not have undemocratic power and wealth, and where the workers managed them themselves. Such corporations would be far less problematic than the largest ones we have -- including some of my clients. jks I agree, it would be much better, if workers ran and managed the the firms in which they exploited themselves for surplus value. Honestly though, hasn't the history of creating such entities, like say Mondragon or the Amana Colony or the kibbutz movement and all the utopian socialist movements of the past-- co:operatives included--proven that they always morph into the undemocratic, totalitarian corporate structures which we see ruling us today? In other words, hasn't wage-labour always resulted in the developement of capitalist social relations? Sincerely, Mike B) = Beers fall into two broad categories: Those that are produced by top-fermenting yeasts (ales) and those that are made with bottom-fermenting yeasts (lagers). http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Search - Find what youre looking for faster http://search.yahoo.com __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Search - Find what youre looking for faster http://search.yahoo.com
Re: corporations/More Side Issue
There has been a lot of discussion of the question you ask about the behavior of people in a self-managed economy, some of it mathematized. For for formal discussion, see various works of Jaroslav Vanek, including, I think, The Labor Managed Economy, and Benjamin Ward's classic paper 'The Firm in Illyria: Market Syndicalism', American Economic Review, 1958; there is an older (almost all this stuff is older now), collection of papers and documents, etc., in an out-of-print 2 vol. set called something like Self-Managed Socialism, edited by Branko Horvat, Mihalo Markovic, and others. David Schweickart, a philosopher who has a PhD in math, has a fairly nontechnical but empirically grounded discussion in his Against Capitalism, Westview 1993. The general idea about is that in their economic activities, worker-cooperators will act as if they were profit-maximizers, but the fact that labor is not a cost gives them a different set of incentives from capitalist firms that are explored in the books and papers above. Somed of these incentives produce more internalization of cost and more socially productive behavior than profit-maxing under capitalism. Other social goals are attained through legislation (including taxation), refgulation, and planning. I don't think there is any need to put scare quotes around contracts in a market socialist society. A contract is just a legally enforceable promise, and any market society, maybe any modern society, will have a legal system and a set of rules for contract law. jks --- Sabri Oncu [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Justin: Moreover one could imagine a market society where, for example, the corporations did not have undemocratic power and wealth, and where the workers managed them themselves. This is an interesting point. I have never been against optimizing objective functions, assuming that objectives can reasonably be mathematized. Here is a question Justin: What may be some objectives of workers managed corporations in the market society you imagine? Put differently, what kind of contracts such corporations and the persons that embody them will have to sign in this market society? Of course, before such a society is constructed we may never know what these contracts will exactly look like but what do you expect them to look like, approximately, that is? Best, Sabri __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Search - Find what youre looking for faster http://search.yahoo.com
Re: Corporations
the limited liability law means that a corporation is much more than a bunch of voluntary contracts amongst individuals. The power of the state means that the whole is more than the sum of its parts, so that the corporation is a legal person. (A legal person that's like an actual person in many ways, with the obvious exception with respect to the right to vote. But I doubt that corporations -- especially the bigger ones -- need the power to vote. They dominate government anyway.) I agree that metaphysically a corp. is more than a series or collection of contracts among individuals -- it has to be. Individuals could not contract to limit their liability to the parties. The state has to allow them to do that. The corporation's existence depends on the sufferance of the law. However, the while the corp is collective entity, like a state or a union or any group that is more than the sum of its parts, t make a corp. a person within the meaning of the law required a specific _further_ legal act by a body (in the US the S.Ct.) with the power to say, as the S.Ct did, that a corp. is a person within the meaning of the 14the Amendment. I don't think is thsi is true in other countries. If its is, it requiresa specific legal act by a competent authority. With respect to tortious[*] liability, the corporate form provides no protection for individuals who commit torts. That is correct. The only protection the corporate form provides is a modification to the doctrine of respondeat superior (the employer is liable for the acts of the employee who commits an act in the scope of the employment). I don't understand this. Protection for whom? In other words, while the corporation's assets are liable for the acts of the employee, the shareholder's personal assets are not responsible for the torts committed by an employee, Yes unless the shareholder himsef committed a tort But that is irrelevant to his being a shareholder ot to the existence of the corporation. or the shareholder did not respect the corporate form (alter-ego). Well, the last is a bit confused. It is possible to pierce the corporate veil in certain cases and id certain conditions are met, reaching the assets of a shareholder (who may or may not be an individual). The conditions under which thsi is possible vary by state, but most states include the conditions of failing to respect corporate formailities, commingling funds, and importantly, using the corporate form to commit a fraud or injustice. it's the share-holder's greed -- as organized by stock markets -- that drives the company to accumulate power in order to maximize profit, which in turn puts people outside the company at risk in this situation. Why should the taxpayers pay for the clean-up? why should the neighbors of the company pay for the medical costs of the company's malfeasance? According to limited liability laws, they should (after a point). Even though they never made the decision to act in the way that caused the damage. But first, is not a specific problem with corporations. All capitalist enterprize externalize costs, whether or not they are corporations. Second, the short answer to your question is that the corporate form is permitted to limit liability because that's been determined by the legislature or the competent authorities to encourage investment, promote economic growth, and generally have benefits that exceed their social costs. The following is therefore false: The limited liability law is a free benefit given to corporations (at their own behest, basically, since they have influenced the courts in their favor since the 19th century), allowing them to shift risk to others. In theory, there is some compensation in that corporations are supposed to pay the corporate income tax. But in practice, that tax is very low and rapidly going away. Unless you think that the consequences for economic growth involved in abolsihing the corporate form, and requiring all investors to expose themselves and all their assets to potentially runious liability would not be as serious as many suppose. which is true in the case of big disasters. But the limited liability law is always in the background, allowing the stockholders to ignore the morality or immortality and the non-financial risk of their financial holdings. The taxpayers are acting as the cost-payers of the last resort, so that corporations don't have do act without a net. why? shouldn't those people who hired him -- the stockholders, through their agent, the Exxon corporation -- pay attention to who they hire? Uh, that's silly. It would be irrational to demand that sort of due diligence for every stock purchase. No one could do it. Because they're not held responsible, the stock-holders are able to ignore the risks they impose on others (external costs). This encourages corporations in their malfeasance. If stockholders knew ahead of time about their
Re: Corporations
David: Who said limited liability was limited to torts? The corporate forms protects its investors against all liabilities -- contractual, tort, property, civil rights and other statutory -- even criminal to a point, bankruptcy, etc. Moreover it is not treue that the only argument has been reference to limited liability vs. torts or anything else. A number of folks, Ian and myself include, have emphasized that the corporation is a creature of law that has real social efficacy like any other social groups. The contract is also a creature of law, and like the corporate form depends on that social entity the state, which not reducible to the behavior of the individuals in it. The corporate form, created by operation of law, is a different thing from the contract: It depends on the forbearance of the state in going after the shareholderholders for the debts of the corporation, something that the law does not permit the parties to contract around. (OK, you and I agree that we are not liable for debts to anyone else. Good luck making that one stick, fella!) I don't know why you bring up strict liability -- liability without fault. That exists in some cases as a matter of operation of the law. But it is sort of anomalous. Anyway, there is nothing inherent about any law -- positive law, enacted, common, constitutional, administrative whatever. It's all a social product of the state imposed of policy reasons or because of political influence or corruption or whatever. You may be right about the effect of abolishing the corporate form -- a big shift to debt-based financing. However, there are presumably reasons based in part on efficiency and lowerted transactions costs for equity based financing. There is no point in pretending these are the same or equivalent. I am not a defender come what may of the corporate form, but I am not an uncritical enemy of it either. It really depends on how it plays out. Big capitalist corporations mainly suvk, but I suspect thay is because they are capitalist rather than because they are corporate. Pro-planning Marxists used to cite the predominance of the corporate form as evidence that there was no necessary connection between ownership and good management -- an argument I still think is valid. Maybe the recent problems with corporate governance have undermined their confidence. . . . jks --- David B. Shemano [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: So many things to say. The only argument offered why the corporation is more than a sum of contracts is limited tort liability. But as I said, that assumes that there is some inherent LAW that says the principal employer should be strictly liable for the torts of the agent, and that is simply not the case. Respondeat superior is a state imposed liability imposed for policy reasons. I am very surprised that members of this list would act as if there is an objective Platonic law and limited liability is a deviation from that law. Second, I think the argument that limited liability is the primary benefit of the corporation is simply incorrect. If limited liability were removed from corporations, there would be a massive shift from equity financing to debt financing. In other words, investors will call themselves creditors and not shareholders. The line between equity and subordinated debt is very close, but the courts have no problem calling one equity and one debt. Are you going to take the position that creditors should be strictly responsible for the tortious acts of their borrowers (assuming they do not control the acts of the borrower)? However, corporations would continue because of transaction cost advantages over partnerships and joint ventures. Jim Devine's insistence that limited liability permits shareholders to ignore external costs is simply not realistic. It ignores that the corporation remains liability for its tortious conduct, and shareholders care about their investments. To the extent that the corporation itself is not responsible for externalities, that is a different issue entirely unrelated to limited liability. I have been accused of being reductionist. According to dictionary.com, reductionsist means: An attempt or tendency to explain a complex set of facts, entities, phenomena, or structures by another, simpler set: 'for the last 400 years science has advanced by reductionism... The idea is that you could understand the world, all of nature, by examining smaller and smaller pieces of it. When assembled, the small pieces would explain the whole' (John Holland). Based upon that definition, I accept the label. It is better than being wrong. What really are we fighting about? David Shemano __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Corporations
I always thought that corporations were legal fictions. Legal fictions are legally created entities aren't they? They may be more than this but they certainly are not less. Fictions suggests they are not real. Here is an example of a legal fiction: The notion that that in suing a state official acting in his official capacity you are not really suing the state, which is forbidden under the 1th Amendment as interpreted by the S.Ct. I ran into this problem today. I am trying to process through my new firm's conflicts check process -- to make sure we are not representing and suing the same people -- two pro bono habeas corpus cases in which I represented convicted murderers. The nominal defendant is the prison warden. My secretary reported back that they had to do conflicts checks on the warden. I said, that can't be right. The warden doesn't care; we are really suing the state of Illinois. It and not the warden is the real party in interest. Anyway, corporations are not fictions. They are are real as many people. Imdividuals, I mean. Sure, corps have some of the powers of persons -- contracting, property ownership, suing and being sued, etc. That did not make them persons any more than the fact that I have some of Michael Jordan;s powers (a very few) makes me a basketball player. But I am not speaking of metaphysucal personhood, only of legal personhood. It was a big jump when the S.Ct said that corps were persons under the 14th Amendment, no point in pretending otherwise, even if the other things were true of them. The question of whether corps are fictions is diffewrent from whether they a reducible to interlocking series of contracts,a nd more interesting. The later view is legally an obvious error. The former is potentially an interesting metaphysical error. You are right of course that the law can fail to recognize classes of individual as (full) persons in a legal sense, and has done so. May still, as in denying gays the right to marry in most states. I am not sure what your point is here, though. jks The problem is not claiming that corporations are legal fictions but in claiming that as such they are not some separate entity but a shorthand way of referring to interlocking contracts between individuals the very point that you seem to be making. However your point has nothing to do with corporations not being legal fictions. . . . But surely it is essential to treat corporations as having at least some of the rights of individuals. Are you going to deny corporations the right to own property, sign contracts, pay taxes, sue and be sued, all capacities of individuals? Whether or not there is some special legal recognition of corporations as persons any legal system will surely want to give corporations rights such as these.. . . . Of course for corporations to be persons under the law, the law must say that they are. But this is true of individuals too. There was a time when women werent persons and slaves were not either as far as their legal status was concerned. To be an individual person does not entail being a legal person. Cheers, Ken Hanly __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail - More reliable, more storage, less spam http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: Corporations
This discussion is getting a bit off the rails. Corporations are not legal fictions -- they are legally created entities, no more or less real than contracts. It is a strange species of methodological individualism to deny that they really exist merely because they are constituted out of indiviuals and their relations. What in the social world isn't? They are as real as nations and classes and races and governments and courts, etc. But at the same time they are not evil per se. It is secondary to describe them as an arrangement that minimizes transaction costs. They do that, but that does not disctinguish them from partnerships or companies or any sort of enterprise that arranges its activities outside the market world of contarcts. (Which is part of the reason, actually, why it is an error to reduce corporations to sets of contracts!) Primarily corporations are an arrangement for limiting liability, so that the creditors can't reach the shareholders' assets beyond their investment in the corporation. That is an OK purpose, granting the Okayness of a market economy and a legal sytem that creates creates like creditors. Some here will deny that that is OK, of course, but I don't. What Gene and others object to is two things, I think: not the legal device for limiting liability, but the fact that some corporations have vast wealth and power that distorts democracy and gives too much influence to a small number of people, and a legal system that treats these entities as if they were individual persons due the legal rights (like free speech) that are properaly accorded to individuals. In most societies, even market societies, the latter is not true -- corporations are not persons, as far as I knwo, under British law (any Brits out there who can correct me?), and anyway the Brits don't have a First Amendment. Moreover one could imagibe a market society where, for eaxmple, the corporations did not have undemocratic power and wealth, and where the workers managed them themselves. Such corporations would be far less problematic than the largest ones we have -- including some of my clients. jks --- David B. Shemano [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Eugene Coyle writes: This interlocking series of contracts has the right of free speech? I think the series of responses Shemano gives in this thread is sillier than neo-classical micro. He describes a total phantasy world, just as the micro theorists do. But the world both try to hide is terribly real. This stuff is much worse than people have been asked to leave the list over. Disgusting stuff. I'd say beneath contempt, but I don't know what is lower. I have never seen a corporation speak. I have seen real people speak on behalf of corporations. Why do you believe that those people do not have a right to speak? What is that word Marxists like to use to describe unreal objects that people think are real? Fetish? You see a bogeyman called a corporation. You are fetishing the corporation. I see tens, hundreds, thousands of contracts between real people intended to actualize a real end. The entity is an acknowledged legal fiction that minimizes transaction costs. That is all. Exxon is simply a shorthand way to describe thousands of real people acting in a united way, and the corporate form provides an expedient way of organizing those real people. What disgusts you? What is beneath contempt? What is the fantasy? David Shemano __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Search - Find what youre looking for faster http://search.yahoo.com
Re: Criminal editing of the Enemy
OK, a clear violation of the First Amendment. This is moronic McCarthyism. It will not survive contact with the courts, if it gets that far. That is not a reason to rejoice, of course. The ACLU has other things to do than to squash blatantly illegal regulations. Sigh. jks --- joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Treasury Department Is Warning Publishers of the Perils of Criminal Editing of the Enemy February 28, 2004 By ADAM LIPTAK Writers often grumble about the criminal things editors do to their prose. The federal government has recently weighed in on the same issue - literally. It has warned publishers they may face grave legal consequences for editing manuscripts from Iran and other disfavored nations, on the ground that such tinkering amounts to trading with the enemy. Anyone who publishes material from a country under a trade embargo is forbidden to reorder paragraphs or sentences, correct syntax or grammar, or replace inappropriate words, according to several advisory letters from the Treasury Department in recent months. Adding illustrations is prohibited, too. To the baffled dismay of publishers, editors and translators who have been briefed about the policy, only publication of camera-ready copies of manuscripts is allowed. __ Do you Yahoo!? Get better spam protection with Yahoo! Mail. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
Fwd: Why U.S. Labor Law Has Become a Paper Tiger
Note: forwarded message attached. __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools---BeginMessage--- Why U.S. Labor Law Has Become a Paper Tiger Date: Sun, 22 Feb 2004 21:50:01 -0500 Message-Id: [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Mailer: Open WebMail 2.30 20040103 X-OriginatingIP: 66.65.35.252 (modps) MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1 New Strategies Why U.S. Labor Law Has Become a Paper Tiger By David Brody New Labor Forum - Spring 2004 http://forbin.qc.edu/newlaborforum/ The National Labor Relations Act, whose stated purpose and original effect was to encourage collective bargaining, has been hijacked by its natural enemies. The law serves today as a bulwark of the union-free environment that describes nine- tenths of our private sector economy. My aim is to identify the central process at work in this amazing outcome and, on that basis, suggest a course of action. The core of the law, as true today as on the day Franklin D. Roosevelt signed it in 1935, are three interlocking sections. Section 7 declares the rights of workers. These were not new in 1935. They had already appeared in the Norris-LaGuardia Anti-Injunction Act of 1932, and had been a long time evolving. In 1935 they were uncontroversial. Section 8 listed a set of unfair labor practices, acts that violate the Section 7 rights, which, under Section 10, the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) was empowered to prevent. This was new, but not surprising. The rights enunciated as public policy in Norris-LaGuardia were merely expressions of principle until the labor law made them enforceable. Sections 7 and 8 were reported out of Senator Wagner�s committee as a package. Finally, Section 9 dealt with the issue of union recognition, setting forth the criteria that justified, in effect, a constraint on the employer�s liberty of contract. It became an unfair labor practice to refuse to bargain, and bargain exclusively, with a labor organization chosen by a majority of the employees in an appropriate unit. Section 9 further provided that, if the demonstration of majority support was supervised by the NLRB, the labor organization so chosen would be certified and be officially designed as bargaining agent. For that purpose, the NLRB could hold a secret ballot. It is this final wrinkle, the representation election, that is the focal point of my discussion. I want to defer any consideration of the defects that make unions increasingly hostile to the representation election and cut at once to what, viewed historically, is the crux of the problem: namely, that the representation election is the instrument by which labor�s enemies have hijacked the law. Historically, it was self-organization-workers freely associating to advance their common interests-that produced the labor movement and gave it legitimacy. Indeed, the definitive case establishing the legality of unions, Commonwealth v. Hunt (1842), grounded that finding on the view that trade unions were voluntary associations, and were presumed, in an enterprising society whose hallmark was voluntary association, to be in the public interest until, by the standards that applied to all combinations, they acted unlawfully. The trade unions embraced self-organization (and in Gompers� time elevated it, under the rubric of voluntarism, into the defining principle of the AFL). And so did the Wagner Act, whose enumeration of the rights of workers in Section 7 begins with self- organization. The succeeding rights-to assist, form, or join labor organizations, to bargain collectively, to engage in concerted activity-all march in concert with self-organization, except in one respect. The right to bargain collectively is qualified by the words, through representatives of their own choosing. This familiar phrase might seem unproblematic, inherent in any statement of worker rights, but in fact representatives of their own choosing has its own particular history.[1] It first appeared, as best I can determine, during the labor crisis after World War I and was fashioned against a specific challenge: company unions-employee representation plans, so called-that gave employers the excuse that they need not deal with outside unions because their employees already were exercising their right to organize and bargain collectively. The issue crystallized during the Steel Strike of 1919, the greatest recognition strike in American history. The union response was: ok, let the employees choose-and that�s the origin of representatives of their own choosing. Nothing came of this effort; the steel strike, in a long train of failed recognition strikes, failed. But the issue had been injected into a grand conclave on a postwar labor policy for the nation, and given a standing it might otherwise not have had. Once enunciated, employee choice stuck, finding its way into every subsequent federal law involving labor�s rights,
/Right Wing Rock/Bob
Ted Nugent is a right wing rocker. My Back Pages is certainly -- ehatever else it is -- a definite kiss-off to Popular Front fellow-travelling pro-Communism of the Weavers/Pete Seeger sort. See also It's All Right Ma, from Bringing It All back Home, even more definitively: While some on principles baptized To strict party platform ties Social clubs in drag disguise ... Hard to miss. And Bob has had a bad right wing moment, in Infidels, with that awful pro-Isarael song (Neighborhood Bully) and a sort of ambiguosu anti-union song (union sundown). However, he's been generally progressive, especially on race and antiwar issues, over the years; he was featuring Masters of War in really savage versions through the buildup to the Iraq war. A decade ago he played Chimes of Freedom at the Clinton Inaugural -- waste of a good song, buta great version, actually. I think Bob revels in ambiguity -- his most famous song, if there is one, is a series of questions; and ultimately he was stifled by the complacent certainty of the folk protest set. They Knew All the Answers. That's death to Dylan. Likewise by his subsequent experiments in certainty with the Jesus crowd and the Chassids. Now he's back to agonized amiguity, and awesomely good. He's been greater for longer than anyone else I can think of, despite his ups and downs. jks --- Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In my rightwing days, I used to read Dylan's My Back Pages as a libertarian anthem (see lyrics below). Reasons: ideas as my map (e.g., Soviet planning rather than Hayekian spontaneous order); lies that life is black and white (critique of Communist certainty); and especially the use of the word liberty, which is almost a marker of conservative thought, and the contemptuous treatment of the word equality. Stereolab has a song about Kontradieff waves that suggests the terminal crisis of capitalism (Ping Pong), lyrics also below. Evidently they didn't read my piece in LM counseling against that sort of thing. On the far right, there's 80s stuff like Skrewdriver (Oh No Here Comes a Commie, White Power/Smash the IRA), Rahowa (short for Racial Holy War), the stuff on Resistance Records http://www.resistance.com, and the neo-Nazi branch of Norwegian death metal. Doug Michael Perelman wrote: Pat Boone. On Fri, Feb 20, 2004 at 01:04:56PM -0500, Louis Proyect wrote: Davis Meshano wrote: Mojo Nixon! The greatest live performer in the history of rock n' roll, and a libertarian to boot. I could spend all day quoting Mojo Nixon. A libertarian? Wow! That leads to an interesting question. How many other rightwingers made a living as rock-and-rollers? The only one I can think of is Ted Nugent. Maybe you can include Stereolab as well. They were hanging around Frank Furedi's cult for a while. Other than that, there's none that come to mind. Louis Proyect Marxism list: www.marxmail.org Bob Dylan, My Back Pages http://www.bobdylan.com/songs/backpages.html Crimson flames tied through my ears Rollin' high and mighty traps Pounced with fire on flaming roads Using ideas as my maps We'll meet on edges, soon, said I Proud 'neath heated brow. Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now. Half-wracked prejudice leaped forth Rip down all hate, I screamed Lies that life is black and white Spoke from my skull. I dreamed Romantic facts of musketeers Foundationed deep, somehow. Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now. Girls' faces formed the forward path From phony jealousy To memorizing politics Of ancient history Flung down by corpse evangelists Unthought of, though, somehow. Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now. A self-ordained professor's tongue Too serious to fool Spouted out that liberty Is just equality in school Equality, I spoke the word As if a wedding vow. Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now. In a soldier's stance, I aimed my hand At the mongrel dogs who teach Fearing not that I'd become my enemy In the instant that I preach My pathway led by confusion boats Mutiny from stern to bow. Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now. Yes, my guard stood hard when abstract threats Too noble to neglect Deceived me into thinking I had something to protect Good and bad, I define these terms Quite clear, no doubt, somehow. Ah, but I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now. __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail SpamGuard - Read only the mail you want. http://antispam.yahoo.com/tools
Better Lose With Kerry Than Win With Dean?
dem power brokers would prefer losing with kerry to winning with dean... I find the claim doubtful. I would like to hear your reasons for holding it. This is the way I see things, please feel free to tell me where I go wrong. Dean was not a threat to the system, nor was the little bit of buzz around his campaign. And way way too much is at stake. The Dems want to win. They would have backed Dean if they thought he could have won. I did, for a while, tenattively,w hen it looked like he could win. The Dems like Kerry -- hell, I like Kerry -- because they think he might be able to win. Policywise Kerry's not that different from Dean. But Dean had big negatives when people _saw_ him; unlike you, I don't think that the reaction was purely generated by press hostility. He campaigned poorly generated dislike. He annoyed people. What do you think? jks __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Re: Psychoanalysis Re: happiness is a transitory state
Crews has a LOT more to say one the subject, most of it which struck me as pretty sensible when I read it. And congruent with what other perhaps more sympathetic critics, like Adolph Grunbaum, have had to say. I don't want to get into the details, but this is not just a blow-off opinion. There is depth and thought behind it. jks --- Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Carrol Cox wrote: 1. What validity does psychoanalysis have? Answer: [P]sychonalysis [is] a mistake that grew into an imposture. Frederick C. Crews, Preface to _Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend_, ed. Frederick Crews (New York: Viking, 1998), p. ix. Well that settles it! Next question? Doug __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Finance: Get your refund fast by filing online. http://taxes.yahoo.com/filing.html
Skull and Bones
Michael Perkman said that you would be a good person to ask about Yale's Skull Bones -- did you have a recent post or some information on this? Thanks, jks __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/
Holmes and Progressivism
Holmes was actuallya fairly rabid laissez faire pro-capitalist. He believed fiercely in Eugenics (his savagely terse opinion upholding Carrie Buck's sterilization sums up the tenor the movement with characteristic concision and clarity: Three generations of imbeciles is enough. --OWH Jr was not a nice man . . . ). Holmes personally opposed worker-protective wage and hour laws, consumer product safety laws, and the antitrust laws. He thought these promoted the weak and debilitated the species. His early views of free speech, until he fell under Brandies; influence, were appalling. He thought that passing out leaftlets calling for unpholding your constitutional rights to oppose the draft was the equivalent of shouting fire ina croweded theater, and warranted a very long prison sentence. What Holmes is famous for, of course, is three thigs: (1) glorious, pithy prose, most unlike the clotted efflugia most lawyers produce then and now, (2) dissenting when other Justices whose policy views he agreed with wrote these into the Constitution via the due process cuase. The Fourtheenth Amendment does not enact Mr. Herbert Spencer's Social Statics, Holmes wrote in his famous dissent in Lochner v. NY (wage and hour case). But Holmes thougfht that Spencer, an extreme laissez-faire capitalist social Darwinist, was right -- just that his views were not required by the Constitution. (3) AT the end of his career, Holmes and Brandeis came to formulate a speech-protective First Amendment doctrine, initially in a series of dissents. But I think that it's clear that Brandeis deserves most of the credit there. So, Holmes was no Progressive. Brandeis was a Progressive. Cardozo was a Progressive. Not Holmes, He was a more complicated figure. But he was a great judge,a nd not least because he was able to put aside his personal views and call the law the way hw saw it even when he disagreed with it. Maybe there is a way in which H contrubuted importantly to Progressive thought. The Progressives had a lot of respect for legislative power to fix social progrems. Holmes didn't, but he had even less respect for judicial interference in that progress. By helping to formulate the idea that the legislature should be able to do any damn fool thing it likes in sociala nd economic police, but not (as with free speech) individual rights), Holmes helped to lay the basis for the New Deal judicial transformation that got rid of the bad ideas that Holmes used to dissent against, that laissez faire is part of the Constitution. jks --- Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The word, progressive, was supposed to be more related to science than politics. Progresses wanted a merit system based on tests to determine political appointments. They believed in scientific management. Frederick Taylor, in fact, fit right in with the Progressives. For them, the highest levels of the social structure should reflect merit rather than class. That eugenics should appeal to Progressives should be no surprise. On Mon, Feb 02, 2004 at 08:30:39AM -0800, Devine, James wrote: the supporters of eugenics included such progressive [sic] thinkers as Woodrow Wilson, Margaret Sanger, and Oliver Wendell Holmes. back in the early part of the 20th century, progressive referred to middle-class and especially upper-middle-class advocates of a government intervention in the economy in the name of the public interest (as opposed to laissez faire types). That is, it was people who nowadays we might call liberal. the word progressive is profoundly ambiguous. is it Bull Moose and Teddy Roosevelt? or Lafollette? or Henry Wallace? Jim D. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail michael at ecst.csuchico.edu __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/
Re: [Fwd: Re: Howard Dean, Nader, Chomsky and Stalin]
The Alterboy is very strange. Sticking together a centrist Democratic governor and Prez candidate, a disaffected populist pro-market but anticorporate consumer advocate and protest politician, an anarchist linguistics scholar abnd radical foreign policy analyst with a multi-decade passionate commitment to democracy and human rights . . . and _Stalin_, well, is just bizzare. Is the idea that if you don't support Kerry, Clark, or Edwards you are (a) a self-indulgent spoiler apologist for the Khmer Rouge and Holocaust Revisionism who is also a enemy of human freedom and an advocate of a single party dictatotship and an unbridled secret police repression? Or what? Spam, spam, eggs and Stalin indeed. Good catch, Louis. jks (Who does, this time, supportm withashes in his mouth, Kerry, Clark, Edwards or Dean - ABB.) To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Did you notice that Alterman brings up Stalin three times on that blog page? We get the Nader, Dean, Chomsky and Stalin axis on Jan 26th, the whines of certain anti-Semitic, Stalinist Nation columnists who have just published self-justifying books on the 21st, and on Jan 14th he actually brought up Stalinesque show trials in conjunction with something that happened on the right. And for breakfast I'd like spam, spam, Stalin, eggs, Stalin, bacon, spam and Stalin. And bring me a copy of the Workers Vanguard while you're at it. Eric Alterman: Im sure Dean has many idealistic supporters. And for all I know, he might make a terrific president. But my honest opinion is that hed be a much weaker candidate against Bush than Kerry, Clark or Edwards, and since thats the only issue that moves me, I think it would be a big mistake to give him the nomination. Ive enumerated reasons for this in the past and I think they become more apparent every day. (And be honest, while he was brave and outspoken on the war when others were quiet and cautious, do you really think he would handle the current quagmire better than any other of his major rivals? Just what in his career as a country doctor and governor of Vermont leads you to that?) I suspect that some of these people did Dean more harm than good in Iowa. Moreover, its kind of pathetic that so many people on the left become so tied into hero worshipNader, Dean, Chomsky, (and dare I say it, Stalin)that they feel a need to abuse anyone who does not share their wide-eyed admiration. I expect this kind of vituperation for any kind of deviationism is what turns many leftists and liberals into conservatives. (Its not working with me yet, but hey, Im only 44 and Scaife hasnt come up with an attractive enough offer.) full: http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3449870/ -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free web site building tool. Try it! http://webhosting.yahoo.com/ps/sb/
Re: something new???
Stalin made it (during the war) and then back. jks --- Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Is Qadhafi the first person in US history to make the transition from demon to statesman? Usually, it goes the other way. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] __ Do you Yahoo!? Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now http://companion.yahoo.com/
Re: A conversation overheard
Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep for ever: Jefferson, On Slavery, Notes On the States of Virginia, p. 171 in my edition. --- joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I fear to think of what it will take to wake this country up...or what will happen if they choose not to. Joanna Eugene Coyle wrote: Stopped at an I-Hop for lunch on the road today. Three women, dressed as office workers, perhaps 25 - 35 years old, took the next table. They chatted, then one spoke of a friend in the service in Iraq, working on restoring the electrical grid. They'd come under attack, and one boy lost an arm, a second a leg, taken off at the very top. The second one said I'm not paying attention to that. The third one said Have you got your Christmas lights up yet? and they chatted. Gene Coyle __ Do you Yahoo!? Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now http://companion.yahoo.com/
Re: Antisemism and the Us Left/(Was Zionists American Blacks)
Apparently I was not clear enough. Let me me a bit brutal. Your position is politically stupid and self destructive. Whether it is reasonable or not, a lot of Jews, American and Israeli, feel the weight of historical persecution. This also true of left Jews. You can tell them, You Have No Right! You are Not Oppressed! You are Oppressors! You may be correct. You will not persuade them. You will not win them as allies. I am not talking about the Sharonistas or the Foxmaniacs. I am talking about left and progressive Jews of the sort who have played a large role in our movement, as well as liberal Jews who have been our allies. So, you have to decide whether you want to be Right or Effective. If you want to be effective, you have to figure out how to address the concerns and insecurities that drive a group whose status as relatively privileged is recent and felt to be weak. Or you can carry on, but in that case, I'd seriously suggest that you shut up and let people like me talk to the Zionists; I have a hard enough time of it, but there is a remote chance that I might bea ble to do some good. The sort of backchat that you indulge in here is actually actively harmful. It doesn't matter if it true. Sometimes true is not that important. You have to figure out how to say it. I don't have a great idea myself, but you are not within a million miles. jks --- Yoshie Furuhashi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At 10:45 AM -0800 12/7/03, andie nachgeborenen wrote: All that said, I don't see that it is crazy, stupid, silly, or even obviously wrong for Jews to demand some sort of special privileges for reasons that are not that dissimilar from the reasons that African Americans can make the same demand. The problem with LCP's theory is that the Jews may be entitled to some form of affirmative action, but that the Law of Return is the appropriate form of that affirmative action. In Israel, Jews are, legally, politically, and economically, the dominant group, and Palestinians are the subordinate group in a position comparable to American Blacks'. Given the relation of power between Jews and Palestinians of Israel and the Occupied Territories, it's mind-boggling to demand affirmative action for Jews, rather than for Palestinians. -- Yoshie * Bring Them Home Now! http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/ * Calendars of Events in Columbus: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html, http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php, http://www.cpanews.org/ * Student International Forum: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/ * Committee for Justice in Palestine: http://www.osudivest.org/ * Al-Awda-Ohio: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio * Solidarity: http://www.solidarity-us.org/ __ Do you Yahoo!? Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now http://companion.yahoo.com/
Re: Antisemism and the Us Left/(Was Zionists American Blacks)
Yoshie, this is tiresome and perverse. I did not say you had to be a Jew to criticize Zionism. I said that your denunciatory approach, though morally correct, was not constructive. I can get away with it somewhat better thana non-Jews, but even from me it is not very effective. It is the equivalent of refusing to stand for the Star Spangling Banner at the ballgame,a technically justified position that mainly pisses people off. It doesn't help builda llinaces to tell your potential allies, Don't Be Stupid, Your Fears Are Irrational, Your History Is Irrelevant, You Are The Oppressor Now. So criticize. But think! What do you want to accomplish? To show that you are Right and they are Wrong? Or to persuade people and cement alliances? Think of it as a teaching exercise. --- Yoshie Furuhashi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: At 12:59 PM + 12/8/03, Seth Sandronsky wrote: How do we help build the anti-war impulse in people with various identities, all of whom suffer from losses of humanity? I'd insist upon a single standard. If the idea is that only Jews can criticize Zionists and Israel, we ought to stick to the same idea vis-a-vis all ethnic/national/racial groups: only Blacks can criticize the Nation of Islam, Robert Mugabe, etc.; only Muslims can criticize fanatic Islamists; only Arabs can criticize Arab tyrants; only Palestinians can criticize suicide bombers who attack civilians; only North Koreans can criticize the North Korean government; etc. That's identity politics run amok, but that would be at least consistent. -- Yoshie * Bring Them Home Now! http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/ * Calendars of Events in Columbus: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html, http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php, http://www.cpanews.org/ * Student International Forum: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/ * Committee for Justice in Palestine: http://www.osudivest.org/ * Al-Awda-Ohio: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio * Solidarity: http://www.solidarity-us.org/ __ Do you Yahoo!? Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now http://companion.yahoo.com/
Antisemism and the Us Left/(Was Zionists American Blacks)
I am not a Zionist and I do not favor the Law of Return, but I am not sure why LCP's argument is ridiculous. It may be perceived as ridiculous by African Americans, but that just because they might see Jews as just privileged white people -- I speculate here. Historically, and it is not all ancient history, Jews were not white, and were terribly oppressed, and suffered incredible exploitation and humiliation. Leaving aside the reason why I almost certainly have no living relatives left in Eastern Europe after the 1940s, the oppression that Jews suffered in that part of the world at the end of the 19th century is why I am here. I repeat, because this post will provoke outraged bleats about Israeli savagry, all entirely justified, that I oppose the Law of Return for Jews, and oppose, in principle any ethnic or religious states, and I think that the salvation, if any of the Israeli Jews is in a multinational secular democratic -- dare we hope for socialist? -- society in Israel and Palestine. All that said, I don't see that it is crazy, stupid, silly, or even obviously wrong for Jews to demand some sort of special privileges for reasons that are not that dissimilar from the reasons that African Americans can make the same demand. The problem with LCP's theory is that the Jews may be entitled to some form of affirmative action, but that the Law of Return is the appropriate form of that affirmative action. Another way to put the point, politically, is that it really dumb for nonJewish leftists to tick off Jewish leftists -- we have after all been a disproportionately large part of our movement for centuries, having contributed, among others, old Whiskers -- even non-Jewish Jews (Deutscher) like me, by suggesting that antisemitism and the history of oppression of Jews is over, irrelevant, doesn't matter, and is improper and non-PC for Jews to raise as an issue. I am not going all Michael Lerner on you. I do not hunt for left antisemitism. I do not accuse my comrade Yoshie of any such thing. I am saying something very specific: it is a moral and political mistake to minimize the history and the present menace of antisemitism. I should say that I am more sensitive to this than I might otherwise be because my daughter reports a that she has experienced at her fancy privare artsy high school in Chicago a disturbingly high level of tolerated Jew-baiting, she says not related at all to Israel, and larded up with jocular references to Nazis. She also says that Jewish kids are putting themselves down or denying their background. Be that as it may, LCP's argument is mistaken, but not ridiculous. jks --- Yoshie Furuhashi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: A liberal Zionist subscriber to the Socialist Register listserv posted Letty Cottin Pogrebin, In Defense of the Law of Return, _The Nation_, December 22, 2003 (available to _The Nation_ subscribers only at http://www.thenation.com/docprem.mhtml?i=20031222s=pogrebin): * Put simply, I view the Law of Return as the affirmative action program of the Jewish people. It's a legal accommodation that has been earned in the same way that preferential educational and employment policies in the United States were earned by people of color: through suffering. If four centuries of slavery and institutionalized racism can justify affirmative action programs for American blacks whether or not they themselves were brought here in chains, then surely twenty centuries of oppression and annihilation--think Crusades, Inquisition, forced conversions, pogroms, the Gulag, the Holocaust--justify similarly discrepant favoritism for Jews in Israel. * I'm glad that Letty Cottin Pogrebin wrote such a preposterous defense of the Law of Return as above. Comparing the Law of Return -- the practice of Jewish supremacy, much like white supremacy in US and South African histories -- to affirmative action programs for American Blacks can only serve to discredit the Law of Return, especially in the eyes of American Blacks themselves. Cf. Melani McAlister, One Black Allah: The Middle East in the Cultural Politics of African American Liberation, 1955-1970, American Quarterly 51.3 (1999), pp. 622-656, http://archives.econ.utah.edu/archives/pen-l/2003w20/msg00143.htm. -- Yoshie * Bring Them Home Now! http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/ * Calendars of Events in Columbus: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/calendar.html, http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php, http://www.cpanews.org/ * Student International Forum: http://www.osu.edu/students/sif/ * Committee for Justice in Palestine: http://www.osudivest.org/ * Al-Awda-Ohio: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio * Solidarity: http://www.solidarity-us.org/ __ Do you Yahoo!? Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now http://companion.yahoo.com/
Re: HELP QUICK PLEASE!!!
I know he's sort of a right wing renegade, but I read Miyaka's Republic of Fear at the time of the first Gulf War, and thought well of it. But for lefter accessible stuff, go to the Middle East Reports (MERIP) site. jks --- [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I'm writing an article for my campus newspaper and I need some help finding information on how the Hussein regime came into power. Can anyone point me to some available we sources? THANK YOU SO MUCH! Benjamin Gramlich __ Do you Yahoo!? New Yahoo! Photos - easier uploading and sharing. http://photos.yahoo.com/
Re: Why Read Marx
I haven't read it, but Brian Leiter is a friend of mine - we went to grad school together -- and he is REALLY smart, very learned, and very sympathetic to sensible socialist projects. Blow him off at your peril. He's an _ally_. Cherish people like him! jks --- Jurriaan Bendien [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Yep, I passed it, but as regards this blog you post, in my opinion is shows only the moral and scientific understanding of an ant. In which case you'd have to recommend a track from Adam and the Ants. J. - Original Message - From: Max B. Sawicky [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, December 04, 2003 5:32 PM Subject: [PEN-L] Why Read Marx One man's opinion: http://webapp.utexas.edu/blogs/archives/bleiter/000542.html __ Do you Yahoo!? Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now http://companion.yahoo.com/
Re: the next wedge issue
--- joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Carrol Cox wrote: As Lou says, a revolutinary party that Solidarity is not the logic of an idea. I repudiate what Melvin is saying because I don't agree with himnot because PEN-L solidarity (whatever that means) requires that I do so. Joanna: There's not much love lost between Melvin and me. But, it seems to me that the whole point of these list-servs is to engage in reasoned dialogs with people one doesn't totally agree with. How else to re-build the left? How else? Right. Melvin offers an intelligent statement of a position that was once widely held on the left, probably less so today, that any organizing and agitation that does not go to class and property issues is a mere distraction. I believe that is what he is saying, that the gay liberation movement is a distraction at best because it doesn't address class. That is not a popular position on whatever is left of the left any more, and was not even popular in its pure form back when it was more widely held. For example, virtually every left organization that I can think of has always opposed racial discrimination and supported, e.g., black liberation under its various names over the years. The distraction argument has tended to be addressed to women's liberation and gay liberation, I believe, and less so than formerly. Why might that be? What explains the difference? That is not a rhetrocal question. One thing that is sometimes said is that women's and gay liberation are merely bourgeois struggles for bourgeois rights, equal treatment with others, nondiscrimination -- but not against exploitation and class privilege. But insofar as this is true, which is limited, isn't that also true of black liberation? And in fact it is not simply true. Just as the black liberation/civil rights/etc. movement has had (to simplify drastically), Booker T Washington accomodationist winds and WEB DuBois militant wings,so all these other movements have had too -- gay liberation as well. Two things should be said, though. One is that I believe, and many on the left do, that reformist goals that promote equality and humanity are worth fighting for even if they do not have directly revolutionary content. For example, it was worth the fight to get women the vote -- and blacks too -- even if all that got them was the right to vote for one or another bourgeois candidate. The second thing is that if improving the lives of people who are unjustifiably oppressed and marginalized requires a further justification, it does tend to overcome divisions among the workers in the long run, even if it is divisive at the time -- as suffrage was. Now all of this is pretty measured. In addition to offering a defense of a reasonable though in my view misguided view, Melvin has expressed some views that many would regard as prejudiced. While he says, and I agree, that it is none of society's business what consenting adults do in the bedroom, he says he finds homosexuality abhorrent. If that just means he doesn't find the idea of engaging himself in that behavior attractive, there can be no argument, but other things he says suggest that he thinks something stronger. He says that homosexuality is strongly correlated to child-molestation, which I believe to be a complete canard; he says that it is a sign of social decadence, which is pretty hard to square with, for example, the Golden Age of Greece. But these remarks suggest that he thinks it is a bad thing. That does not mean that he wants it banned or people who practice it to be abused, but surely it would stigmatize people to say that how they express their love and lust is abhorrent -- not just, perhaps, to Melvin? -- and decadent. And surely stigmatizing people for harmless consensual practices among adults is not what the left wants. jks __ Do you Yahoo!? Free Pop-Up Blocker - Get it now http://companion.yahoo.com/
Re: House Bill on Middle Eastern Studies
My letter to the Senators: 18 November 2003 U.S. Sen. Peter Fitzgerald 555 Dirksen Senate Office Building Washington, DC 20510 Dear Senator Fitzgerald, I am writing to oppose the recent amendment to Title VI of the Higher Education Act passed by the United States House of Representatives. This bill seeks to politicize Middle Eastern Studies by establishing an oversight board to enforce a pro-American attitude, and tying Title VI funds to ideological conformity. I am not a professor, but I am a voting constituent, an attorney concerned with freedom of speech, and a citizen worried about the government and the public having honest and accurate information on which to decide policy. The amendment is an unwarranted interference in academic freedom reminds me more of the policies of Other Countries that we decry for dictating the results of scholarly inquiry to conform to the wishes of the government. The essence of scholarship is suppose to be disinterested inquiry, not cheerleading for government policy. In addition to compromising academic freedom and betraying the values of free speech and unfettered research, the idea of having politicians police Middle Eastern Studies for Un-American Ideas is dumb. Haven't we gotten in enough trouble in the Middle East lately by insisting on things that powerful interests wanted to hear rather than in the truth? The government has shown, by its misuse of CIA reports, that it cannot refrain from politicizing its own analyses. Now it wants to make sure that no views from the outside can disturb its warped perceptions. This is very comfortable, but the end result is that young men and women from working class communities in Decatur and Pilsen and Rockford get blown to bits or maimed for life on dusty roads in foreign countries in pursuit of half-baked policies sold to the public by lies based on false data. Vote against the amendment to Title VI.. It is Un-American. It is unwise. It is not the sort of thing that reflects what we want or need. Sincerely, Justin Schwartz --- Michael Hoover [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2003/11/06/middle_east/index_np.html Osama University? Neoconservative critics have long charged Middle Eastern studies departments with anti-American bias. Now they've enlisted Congress in their crusade. - - - - - - - - - - - - By Michelle Goldberg Nov. 6, 2003 On Oct. 21, the House of Representatives unanimously passed a bill that could require university international studies departments to show more support for American foreign policy or risk their federal funding. Its approval followed hearings this summer in which members of Congress listened to testimony about the pernicious influence of the late Edward Said in Middle Eastern studies departments, described as enclaves of debased anti-Americanism. Stanley Kurtz, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution, a right-wing think tank, testified, Title VI-funded programs in Middle Eastern Studies (and other area studies) tend to purvey extreme and one-sided criticisms of American foreign policy. Evidently, the House agreed and decided to intervene. Emboldened by its dominance of Washington, the right is trying to enlist government on its side in the campus culture wars. Since they are the mainstream in Washington think tanks and the right-wing corridors of Congress, they figure, 'Let's translate that political capital to education,' says Rashid Khalidi, who was recently appointed to the Edward Said Chair of Arab studies at Columbia University. It's not surprising that they started with Middle Eastern studies. There's a particular enmity between hard-line supporters of Israel -- who, with the extraordinary ascension of neoconservatives in the Bush administration, now dominate the American right -- and academics who specialize in studying the Arab and Muslim world. That enmity burst into open conflict after Sept. 11, when conservatives saw an opportunity to accuse Middle East academics not just of biased scholarship but of representing a kind of intellectual fifth column. Soon after the World Trade Center fell, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, a Washington-based group co-founded by Lynne Cheney, wife of the vice president, and Sen. Joe Lieberman, D-Conn., published a report called Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing America and What Can Be Done About It, which listed examples of insufficiently patriotic behavior of the part of the professoriate and called universities the weak link in the war on terror. __ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail
Re: value and gender
--- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think it's a mistake to make a blanket generalization such as that men take a very different view of it than women. At the same time, they seem to enjoy the comfort of a clean house. I do a heck of a lot of housework and related family-maintenance (baby-sitting) work. My wife does, too, but she cares less about the neatness of the house than I do. Me too, but I'm much less efficient about cleaning than she is. jks Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: joanna bujes [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Wednesday, November 19, 2003 8:33 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] value and gender It's pretty clear to me that men take a very different view of it than women. At the same time, they seem to enjoy the comfort of a clean house. I don't know why we'd call it bourgeois -- people have been cleaning themselves and their houses for ever. Joanna ravi wrote: joanna bujes wrote: Some years ago, when I worked for a large, multinational computer company, I sent out an email to everyone in the company asking why men don't do housework. isnt most of what is called housework mostly a meaningless bourgeouis activity? clean this, dust that, the sink should be empty at all times, put the books away in the shelf, fix the slightly leaky faucet in the fourth bathroom, etc. at least that's my excuse ;-). --ravi __ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree
Re: the next wedge issue
More interesting to me is the obsessive labeling. Why does it matter that one is homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, etc. What is any of this about? Don't you know ? Firstly, God forbids human pleasure not in accordance with his Law, and some people see themselves as authorities about that for all of us. But therea re lot of people who have a visceral disgust about sexual behavior different from theirs that is independent of any religiosu beliefs. Secondly, you do need to know, in order to connect with the people you want or need. Well, you wouldn't need to have the label and the identity. Say you were interested, at a particular point, in a man, being one yourself. So you made a pass. If he wasn't interested, what more would it add to, Sorry, fella, you aren't my type, or, gee Im flattered, but I'm already in a relationship/married/not looking just now, to say, I am not gay? You could still look or advertise in the Men Seeking Men personals, etc. You just wouldn't have the label. J. __ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree
Re: the next wedge issue
I didn't say hardwired and independent of social conditioning, I said visceral, meaning, gut,; I wasn't speculating about its cause or origin. I used to see this when I was teaching. Ohio students found (male) homosexuality to be, eeww, yuck, gross, dis-GUST-ing. How would you describe that except as visceral? And their religious beliefs weren't determinative,a lthough the Godly definitely were more likely to share this reaction. So I mean, just independent of religious beliefs. As you knwo, I don't believe that it is even _coherent_ to talk about any sort of behaviore independently of social conditioning. (I'll send you a paper on this that I can'ts eem to get published . . . )jks --- joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But therea re lot of people who have a visceral disgust about sexual behavior different from theirs that is independent of any religiosu beliefs. Visceral? I'm skeptical. Aren't you the one who argues against the causative value of inborn anything. Do you mean visceral disgust independent of religious beliefs only? or also independent of social conditioning? Joanna __ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree
Re: the next wedge issue
. Ohio students found (male) homosexuality to be, eeww, yuck, gross, dis-GUST-ing. your male students said eeww, yuck? that's so gay!! ;-) And my kids, male and female, until I reminded them forcefully that their beloved godparents and auntie are gay. jks __ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree
Re: the next wedge issue
Yes, and? Look, I was just saying that I didn't think that the only reason that homosexuslity was a lightning rod was that people thought that God hates fags. I said taht in my experience many peoples eem to find the thought disgusting. I did not offer a theory as to why. I did not say that the hatred was independent of social conditioning, and I didn't say that some people who display socially approved attitudes about male homosexuality don't engage in the behavior. Any other straw men for me explain that I also don't mean? --- joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Well, Christ!, Justin. Many college students still find oral sex viscerally disgusting...it takes a while. Besides, one thing I can tell you is that while men may publically gag at the idea of having sex with another man, when they get older, like say, after 40, they all start to come clean about a variety of homosexual experiences. It surprised me too, but I have just been amazed at the number of men who have confessed something like this to me in the last five years. So, you know, there's the publicly display attitude...and then there's what people actually do. Joanna andie nachgeborenen wrote: I didn't say hardwired and independent of social conditioning, I said visceral, meaning, gut,; I wasn't speculating about its cause or origin. I used to see this when I was teaching. Ohio students found (male) homosexuality to be, eeww, yuck, gross, dis-GUST-ing. How would you describe that except as visceral? And their religious beliefs weren't determinative,a lthough the Godly definitely were more likely to share this reaction. So I mean, just independent of religious beliefs. As you knwo, I don't believe that it is even _coherent_ to talk about any sort of behaviore independently of social conditioning. (I'll send you a paper on this that I can'ts eem to get published . . . )jks --- joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: But therea re lot of people who have a visceral disgust about sexual behavior different from theirs that is independent of any religiosu beliefs. Visceral? I'm skeptical. Aren't you the one who argues against the causative value of inborn anything. Do you mean visceral disgust independent of religious beliefs only? or also independent of social conditioning? Joanna __ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree __ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree
Re: Western rationality
Pascal's Pensees, Sec IV. para 277. --- ravi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jurriaan Bendien wrote: but then, 'the heart has its reasons, that reason does not know'! I think it is in reality more like, 'the heart has its reasons, that reason does not admit'. perhaps, but i like the original version (pascal?) since it brings out the incompleteness of knowledge arrived at through reasoning alone (and thats not just incompleteness in a mathematical sense, but even incompleteness in the sense of certainty required to act). --ravi __ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree
Re: Advertising
In other words, Joannah, advertising contains content you disapprove of. Now, seems to me we have a pretty good rule in this country about regulation of speech based on content, namely, we don't do it if the speech is not incitrement to immanent unlawful activity, obscene, or a solicitaion to a crime. You sound pretty dour and puritanical there, Seven Deadly Sins, and all that. Presumably you want only Healthy Messages broadcast about . . . jks Sometimes you shock me. There are many, many good reasons to get rid of advertising. Off the top of my head: 1. Advertising suggests that we are missing something, that we are incomplete, and that we can only be completed through consumption. 2. Advertising intrudes upon the public space. 3. Advertising (the sort that is beamed on the telly, interrupting something every ten minutes) is not only a violation of the viewer's integrity and the integrity of the show/movie/etc being interrupted, but it is an implicit attack on the very notion of integrity. 4. Advertising is the modern celebration of the seven deadly sins. I mean that quite literally: watch ANY advertisement and ask yourself what is the underlying theme here: lust? gluttony? sloth? envy? wrath? greed? pride? Joanna __ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree
Re: Western rationality
. I never claimed that western rationality is a western phenomenon. I use it as a name only. And at times I use it intentionally to give the word western a derogatory meaning to take revenge from you westerners. Any objections to that? Sure, all you Orientals are irrational, we wouldn't expect anything better. jks __ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree
Re: the new gated community
Well, the strategic hamlet goes back to Vietnam days. It was used in Central America too. The Israelis of course actually have people who know Arabic. jks --- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: from SLATE's news summary: The LA [TIMES] travels to Saddam's birthplace, the village of Auja, which the military has surrounded with barbed-wire and checkpoints. One officer explains to the Times that residents have a level of security most people don't have. Once they get their ID cards, they are free to come and go. You could compare it to one of those gated communities. The Times deadpans, It's not every gated community that has U.S. soldiers registering residents, photographing them and taking their thumbprints. It sure seems as if the US has learned how to successfully occupy a country from its ally Israel. Jim __ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree
Polish Philosopher Wins $1M Kluge Prize
No one has commented on this today. Polish Philosopher Wins $1M Kluge Prize By CARL HARTMAN Associated Press Writer November 5, 2003, 12:18 AM EST WASHINGTON -- Leszek Kolakowski, an anti-communist Polish philosopher at Oxford University in England, will receive the first $1 million John W. Kluge prize for lifetime achievement in the humanities. Out of deep scholarship and relentless inquiry, Leszek Kolakowski made clear from within the Soviet system the intellectual bankruptcy of the Marxist ideology and the necessity of freedom, tolerance and diversity and the search for transcendence for re-establishing individual dignity, said James H. Billington, the librarian of Congress, in announcing the award. The prize was established by Kluge, founding chairman of the library's private sector advisory body, the James Madison Council, to reward achievement in subjects such as anthropology, history, philosophy and religion for which no Nobel prizes are given. Born in 1927 in Radom, Poland, Kolakowski grew up under German occupation and the communist government that succeeded it after Soviet forces pushed out the Germans. He began his career as an orthodox Marxist and was sent by the Polish Communist Party from Warsaw University to Moscow for advanced study. After he returned, he wrote a critique of Stalinism called What is Socialism? The Polish government banned it, and the Communist Party expelled him in 1966, first from the party, then from his professorship at Warsaw University where he had chaired the section on the history of philosophy. Kolakowski has written more than 30 books in Polish, French, English and German, including a three-volume Main Currents of Marxism: Its Rise, Growth and Dissolution. He became an active adviser and supporter of the Solidarity movement in Poland, which played a seminal role in undermining Communism in Eastern Europe. After going into exile he taught philosophy at McGill University in Montreal; the University of California, Berkeley; Yale University; and the University of Chicago. He is now a senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. __ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree
Re: They decapitate babies don't they?
But that was in another country, and, besides, the wench is dead. --- Brian McKenna [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: PEN-Lers, There's a good article in the New Yorker (see link) in which Seymour Hersh expresses incredulity that this story hasn't gotten much more attention. A HREF=http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?031110ta_talk_hersh;http://www.newyorker.com/talk/content/?031110ta_talk_hersh/A Brian McKenna __ Do you Yahoo!? Protect your identity with Yahoo! Mail AddressGuard http://antispam.yahoo.com/whatsnewfree
Re: The concept of corruption
Judge John T. Noonan has a big and interesting book on the history of corruption, Bribery (1984), really a fascinating read. Standards definitely evolve. In the early common law, it was normal for judges to take gifts from litigants. By the time of Francis Bacon, impeached for corruption from the post of Lord Chancellor (Chief Justice in the Court of Equity) in around 1620, the argument that the gifts did not influence the decision was not accepted in England. Here is a link to a short paper that providesa lighting survey by a lawyer who has to deal with this stuff every day http://www.transparency.ca/Readings/TI-G02.pdf --- Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have no idea how to define corruption. Corporate campaign contributions seem corrupt to me, but not according to American standards. Appointing right-wing hacks to the courts and other political positions since corrupt. Giving away a public resources seem corrupt. Clinton using his power of office to gain sexual favors change corrupt; professors are not immune from such corruption. To others, violations of biblical law seem corrupt. In short, a concept like this defies definition. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] __ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/
Re: Privatizing and selling off Iraq oil assets
Sure, that is the point, isn't it? That's how Russian privatization worked . . . . --- k hanly [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Wouldnt the scheme below end up simply with most shares in the hands of multinational oil giants and the government would have no control over oil resources...? http://www.rppi.org/oilforpeople.html Cheers, Ken Hanly __ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/
Re: The concept of corruption
There are at least two distinct senses of the term methodological individualism: (1) All social phenomena can be explained in terms of individual persons and their states without reference to social facts or states (the nonreductive sense), and (2) All social phenomena can be explained _only_ in terms of individual persons and their states without reference to social facts or states (the reductive sense), i.e., there are no explanatory social facts or properties. The first view is probabaly false and probaly incoherent because the mental states of individuals are social states at least in part. But it's a harmless view if it is taken to say there is also social analysis. The second view is not only false and meaningless, but pernicious, and incompatible with historical materialism. I wrote a paper on this a decade ago, Metaphysical Individualism and Functional Explanation, Phil Science (1993). jks --- Eubulides [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: - Original Message - From: joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, November 02, 2003 5:31 PM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] The concept of corruption Corruption is defined as the abuse of public power for private gain. snip The definition seems pretty good to me. What's methodological individualism? Joanna == It makes all politics and commerce corrupt by definition. It also ignores the problematzing of the public-private distinction. Who gets to decide what 'abuse of power' means? http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Scie/ScieFran.htm Ian __ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/
Re: In defence of Krugman
Actually, no. Roosevelt tried to pack the court, and failed. One of the former bad guy justices switched his view and started supporting the New Deal. The Roosevelt era court mainly supported expanded govt power to regulate business, not primarily enhanced free speech and civil rights. Its most notably free speech decision was probably US v. Dennis (1948), upholding the conviction of the CPUSA leaders for conspiracy to advocate the overthrow of the govt. The real civil libertarian court was the Warren Court, whose key members were Warren and Brennan, appointed by Eisenhower, and Goldberg, Fortas, and Marshall, appointed by Kennedy and Johnson. The one right thing you say here is that the Warren Court era is over. jks --- Kenneth Campbell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: JKS writes:I'd be proud to defend the First Amendment ina NAzi case too. if the gov't cracks down on the Nazis, they crack down on the Left, too, most often in a bigger way. A first amendment defense of the Nazis is indirectly defending the Left. Elementary, my dear Mr. Devine. :) You know, FDR packed the Supreme Court down there and that was a huge influence felt in the social fabric of US lives for decades... an influence which is now waning. But all that free speech stuff, and the finding of a right to privacy in the penumbra of other rights... leading to Roe v Wade... that came through those hired-guns from the FDR and Brandeis-Holmes era. You should definitely support your local loon Nazi's right to smoke tobacco. Ken. -- The Olden Days, alas, are turned to clay. -- Ishtar, at the Deluge __ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/
Tobacco
But I stand with Justin on one thing: YOU put the smoke to yer mouth. YOU inhale. What I do for the tobacco compnaies is antitrust work, not product liability defense. Though the firm does do PL defense, and I would do it for tobacco compnaies if asked. I'm a former pipe smoker myself . . . __ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/
The Court and Free Speech: Re: In defence of Krugman
No and yes. Douglas and Black were important advocates of free speech, but the protections for political speech we have were not won till the Warren Court era. The first major victory was Yates v. US (1957), saetting aside the Smith Act convictions of the lower echelon Communist leaders on grounds of overbreadth, written by Justice Harlan, an Eisenhower conservative. Harlan also write Scales and and Noto (1961), cutting back on the Smith Act somewhat. Justice Goldberger, a Johnson liberal, writes Aptheker v. Sec. of State (1964), upholding a CP leader's right to a passport. The foundational advocacy of illegal conduct opinion is Brandenberg v. Ohio (1969), a per curiam (unsigned) opinion in a Klan case that holds that only speech that advocates immanent illegal conduct may be prohibited. Black and Douglas voted on the right side in all of these, but given the lineup by 1964, their votes were not strictly required. jks --- Kenneth Campbell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Well... yes and no. Yes, it was Warren's court, and Eisenhower was disappointed with his two appointments. But, no, Warren couldn't have done anything without Black and Douglas. And Douglas was a major source of this extreme free speech-ism. (Mind you, I wasn't there.) Ken. -- I used to work in a fire hydrant factory. You couldn't park anywhere near the place. -- Steven Wright -Original Message- From: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of andie nachgeborenen Sent: Saturday, November 01, 2003 6:04 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] In defence of Krugman Actually, no. Roosevelt tried to pack the court, and failed. One of the former bad guy justices switched his view and started supporting the New Deal. The Roosevelt era court mainly supported expanded govt power to regulate business, not primarily enhanced free speech and civil rights. Its most notably free speech decision was probably US v. Dennis (1948), upholding the conviction of the CPUSA leaders for conspiracy to advocate the overthrow of the govt. The real civil libertarian court was the Warren Court, whose key members were Warren and Brennan, appointed by Eisenhower, and Goldberg, Fortas, and Marshall, appointed by Kennedy and Johnson. The one right thing you say here is that the Warren Court era is over. jks __ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/
Re: Query
My favorite books on Marxist economics: 1. Paul Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development -- a wonderfully lucid exposition of Marx's views. 2. Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capitalism. Still the best account of the exploitation of labor in capitalism. 3. Ernest Mandel, Marxian Economic Theory, 2 vols. Rather orthodox but fair and clear, makes serious efforts to fill in gaps in practical sort of way. 4. Howard King, The Political Economy of Marx. A tough-minded, very critical neo-Ricardan account that states (in my view) what is intelligible and defensible in Marx's theory of political economy considered from a somewhat formal point of view. NB, you do NOT need maths to read the book. 5. Robert Brenner, The Brenner Debate: A good introduction to the first Brenner debate, and discussions about various Marxist theories of the rise of capitalism; see also The Boom and the Bubble: the US in the World Economy; the basic text in the _second_ Brenner debater, and the most complete and successful attempt to articulate a credible Marxist theory of crisis. jks --- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I find Harrison's MARXIAN ECONOMICS FOR SOCIALISTS (Pluto) to be very good in terms of a clear presentation. By not hiding political implications, Harrison is in many ways less ideological than those who don't deal with those issues. Charlie Andrews' FROM CAPITALISM TO EQUALITY is also very good. I think it can be found at www.laborrepublic.org but I couldn't open that website today. as for mainstream economics, the Goodwin, Nelson, Ackerman, and Weisskopf book MICROECONOMICS IN CONTEXT (prentice-hall, preliminary edition). Jim -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Fri 10/31/2003 8:19 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Subject: [PEN-L] Query Can anybody suggest a non-ideological, as well as an ideoligcally Marxist primary economics text for me? Benjamin __ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/
The Court
Being a lawyer, I do enjoy this sort of thing. Your facts are right. Black (especially) and Douglas were important forerunners, but compatively isolated on liberties questions. I don't think you dispute that. ACtually it was sort of like Rehnquist's early days on the Burger Courtr,w hich was pretty liberal, as we see in retrospect. And I'm not saying that the Warren Court changed everything from the start, indeed, and more than the Rehnquist Court did. It wasn't till 69 that the Warren Court got in line for Brandenberg. There were bad anti-Communist decisions through the early 60s. I actually think it was the 60s that changed things. Actually, the time of Brandenberg, Black had sort of swung to the right, comparatively. jks --- Kenneth Campbell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hey Justin I will take a re-peek at the Dennis case. But I believe Black (and Douglas) were strongly against it. I believe Rutledge and Murphy were replaced by conservative Democrats. And Frankfurter and Jackson were a kind of reverse of what Eisenhower felt about Warren and Brennan. I guess its really all moot, but if you also enjoy this kind of thing (as I do), what the hell... Myself, Id be more inclined to say that Warren and Brennan signed onto the Black-Douglas train in particular, their efforts against loyalty initiatives. Black-Douglas had long aimed to give First Amendment protection to even those unworthies. The Court, as an entity, resisted their dynamic-duo efforts. In Yolanda Yates case, Black made his famous sarcastic shot against the prosecutions evidence proof here is sufficient if Marx and Lenin are on trial. But they began to get their way (on this issue) with the disappearance of a Vinson, Jackson (Nuremberg prosecutor), Minton, and the advent, as you note, of Warren and Brennan. Douglas wrote about that sea change in his book Court Years: The Court began to swerve its course and act to protect the rights of the people by limiting the thrust of the anti-subversive program. The arrival of Earl Warren made part of the difference. There were other cases before that, where the trend was being given inertia. Like Jones v. Opelika in 1943. Douglas, Black and Murphy joined with Stone, and when Rutledge replaced Byrnes, the mandatory flag saluting crap was overturned. That was a Jehovahs Witness case, btw. The Jehovahs unflagging obnoxiousness also helped clarify some fundamental issues in Canada with the case of Roncarelli v. Duplessis. In the 1940s, the JWs were also irritating the Catholic majority of Quebec going to their door and politely telling them they were all going to hell. Maurice Duplessis was premier of Quebec and he ruled through a triad of reactionary Francophone nationalism, Church authority and big business alliances. Duplessis reacted to public and Church pressure to target the JWs. Roncarelli was some Montreal restaurateur (if I recall) who had the money to keep bailing JWs out when arrested. Duplessis finally ordered a public servant to withdraw Roncarellis liquor licence forever. Justice Rand wrote the opinion, drawing on Marbury v. Madison and Edward Coke et al. Anyway... So, I wont disagree with you if you want to put a historical marker at Warren. I would put it with Douglas and Black, but it doesn't really matter. It wasnt a case of Heeres Earl! and poof it all changed. (I'm not saying you actually said that.) Ken. -- We have no reliance On virgin or pigeon; Our method is science, Our aim is religion. -- Aleister Crowley Actually, no. Roosevelt tried to pack the court, and failed. One of the former bad guy justices switched his view and started supporting the New Deal. The Roosevelt era court mainly supported expanded govt power to regulate business, not primarily enhanced free speech and civil rights. Its most notably free speech decision was probably US v. Dennis (1948), upholding the conviction of the CPUSA leaders for conspiracy to advocate the overthrow of the govt. The real civil libertarian court was the Warren Court, whose key members were Warren and Brennan, appointed by Eisenhower, and Goldberg, Fortas, and Marshall, appointed by Kennedy and Johnson. The one right thing you say here is that the Warren Court era is over. jks --- Kenneth Campbell [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: JKS writes:I'd be proud to defend the First Amendment ina NAzi case too. if the gov't cracks down on the Nazis, they crack down on the Left, too, most often in a bigger way. A first amendment defense of the Nazis is indirectly defending the Left. Elementary, my dear Mr. Devine. :) You know, FDR packed the Supreme Court down there and that was a huge influence felt in the social fabric of US lives for decades... an influence which is now waning. But all that free speech stuff, and the finding of a right to
Re: Engels's use of the term Marxist - reply to Justin
J, this is too long for me; just a few quickies: --- Jurriaan Bendien [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi Justin, Thanks, I'd missed that. But one really has to look for it, right? Yes, although when I studied Engels's writings (published and unpublished) in the early 1980s, I found several loci. I would not be surprised if Engels occasionally adopted the usage that Kautsky popularized in late mid-late 1880s; you won't find it in his work before then, I'ld bet. And, as I said, it's not a common trope. It is just that I do not have the literature handy here anymore, and I am too preoccupied to go to the International Institute of Social History round the corner A lovely place. I once got a research grant from my grad school in England to do some work on Marx there. You should tell the story of how the stiff got there. Later Kautsky made Marxist Into a term of honor. Yes, I would go along with that, except that Kautsky, Plekhanov, Lenin and others did not simply seek to make Marxism a term of honour, but to expound it as a complete theoretical system. Well, of course, but I was just talking abiut the use of the term. Marx's work was radically unfinished, it set an intellectual challenge but did not complete it, but the systematisers and popularisers in practice glossed over this in their urge to present a system of thought which had an answer for everything. Yes, but the handful of remaining true believers in the diamat can be ignored; there are far more people who are not stuck on that view, but who are still stuck on the term. ACtually I don't care about the term one way or the other, but I think it's important not to care about it, rather than to cleave to it, as Soula does, as an emotional symbol of alienation and revolt. But if you use the term socialism, then you can admit many people who are in practice the same in their views as Marxists but reject the specifically Marxist accoutrements. Yes, me too. In fact, like me. I'm one of those people. I disagree because there are still plenty active Marxist parties in the world who cannot be included in those categories. But there is no Communist movement. The so-called Marxist parties have no common revolutionary project. They do not have mass working class support. Self--styled Marxism is livelier in some places than other -- in the US it is totally dead, even in academia -- sorry, guys 'n gals, I wish it were not so -- in other places Marxists can win important university posts and even parliamentary seats. But in the main, the sane Marxist parties are just far-left reform and protest parties, as in Japan or Israel. No one would think that this is the specter that is haunting Europe. I certainly don't dispute that it's worth working with the organized Marxist parties where they exista nd are doing good things,a s they often are, but I also think it is worth working with the Democrats where they do good things. In America, the groups often overlap: the CPUSA has been staunch supporters of the Democratic Parties, on and off but mostly on, since the 1930s. __ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/
Re: In defence of Krugman and against Alexander Cockburn: choice of targets
Attacking left liberals has been Cockburn's forte. He's run a long time smear job on Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a man who has done more to put the Klan and the Ayran Nations literally out of business than anyone else, because Dees doesn't live a life of ascetic poverty, unlike, uh, Cockburn . . . . Oops, I forgot, Cockburn lives pretty well. jks --- Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Krugman is very good at what he does. He's a sharp polemicist, writes very clearly about economics, and annoys the hell out of the right. No, he's not a radical, or a Marxist, or social democrat even. But he doesn't pretend otherwise. He's kind of like Anthony Lewis, only he writes better. I don't see why he provokes this kind of hostility on the left. Why's he worth the effort? Is it envy? Given the state of politics today, prominent talented liberals should be pretty low on our list of enemies. Doug __ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/
Re: In defence of Krugman and against Alexander Cockburn: choice of targets
Like I said, he attacked one of the US's most effective civil liberties lawyers, who has put real hurt on violent hate groups that have (pardon me for getting personal here) killed and injured my friends and their family, because he's not an ascetic and doesn't expect the young ;lawyers whow ork for him to work in crumby conditions. Why don't we go after Michael Tigar, too -- he's made a boatload of dough, maindefending the likes of the Hunts, when he hasn't been defending everyone from Bobby Seale on -- actuallt, he has made a boatload, literally, he owns a boat. Or Kunstler,who was also a wealthy man. Tigar and Kunstler thought they were real radicals -- Dees doesn't -- but maybe they don't like up to Kenny Boy's high standards. --- Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: andie nachgeborenen wrote: Attacking left liberals has been Cockburn's forte. He's run a long time smear job on Morris Dees of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a man who has done more to put the Klan and the Ayran Nations literally out of business than anyone else, because Dees doesn't live a life of ascetic poverty, unlike, uh, Cockburn . . . . Oops, I forgot, Cockburn lives pretty well. jks Actually, it is Ken Silverstein who has exposed Dees. The Church of Morris Dees By Ken Silverstein Harper's Magazine, November 2000 How the Southern Poverty Law Center profits from intolerance Ah, tolerance. Who could be against something so virtuous? And who could object to the Southern Poverty Law Center, the Montgomery, Alabama-based group that recently sent out this heartwarming yet mildly terrifying appeal to raise money for its Teaching Tolerance program, which prepares educational kits for schoolteachers? Cofounded in 1971 by civil rights lawyer cum direct-marketing millionaire Morris Dees, a leading critic of hate groups and a man so beatific that he was the subject of a made-for-TV movie, the SPLC spent much of its early years defending prisoners who faced the death penalty and suing to desegregate all-white institutions like Alabama's highway patrol. That was then. Today, the SPLC spends most of its time--and money--on a relentless fund-raising campaign, peddling memberships in the church of tolerance with all the zeal of a circuit rider passing the collection plate. He's the Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker of the civil rights movement, renowned anti- death-penalty lawyer Millard Farmer says of Dees, his former associate, though I don!t mean to malign Jim and Tammy Faye. The Center earned $44 million last year alone--$27 million from fund-raising and $17 million from stocks and other investments--but spent only $13 million on civil rights program , making it one of the most profitable charities in the country. The Ku Klux Klan, the SPLC's most lucrative nemesis, has shrunk from 4 million members in the 1920s to an estimated 2,000 today, as many as 10 percent of whom are thought to be FBI informants. But news of a declining Klan does not make for inclining donations to Morris Dees and Co., which is why the SPLC honors nearly every nationally covered hate crime with direct-mail alarums full of nightmarish invocations of armed Klan paramilitary forces and violent neo-Nazi extremists, and why Dees does legal battle almost exclusively with mediagenic villains-like Idaho's arch-Aryan Richard Butler-eager to show off their swastikas for the news cameras. In 1987, Dees won a $7 million judgment against the United Klans of America on behalf of Beulah Mae Donald, whose son was lynched by two Klansmen. The UKA's total assets amounted to a warehouse whose sale netted Mrs. Donald $51,875. According to a groundbreaking series of newspaper stories in the Montgomery Advertiser, the SPLC, meanwhile, made $9 million from fund-raising solicitations featuring the case, including one containing a photo of Michael Donald's corpse. Horrifying as such incidents are, hate groups commit almost no violence. More than 95 percent of all hate crimes, including most of the incidents SPLC letters cite (bombings, church burnings, school shootings), are perpetrated by lone wolves. Even Timothy McVeigh, subject of one of the most extensive investigations in the FBI's history-and one of the most extensive direct-mail campaigns in the SPLC's-was never credibly linked to any militia organization. No faith healing or infomercial would be complete without a moving testimonial. The student from whose tears this white schoolteacher learned her lesson is identified only as a child of color. Which race, we are assured, does not matter. Nor apparently does the specific nature of the racist acts directed at him, nor the race of his schoolyard tormentors. All that matters, in fact, is the race of the teacher and those expiating tears. I wept with him, feeling for once, the depth of his hurt, she confides. His tears washed away the film that had distorted
Re: In defence of Krugman and against Alexander Cockburn: choice of targets
Silverstein might bother to learn something about the law before he starts to mouth off at lawyers who aren't doing what he thinks they ought. Postconviction capital defense is noble, but totally gruelling, emotionally exhausting, and extremely expensive. To give you an idea, in a non-capital case I am working on, it took two big time law firms with unlimited resources who devoted eight lawyers to the task four months to research and write a habeas petition for a prisoner. I am certain we (both firms) have spent at least three quarters of a million dollars on this case so far. This is all pro bono. And although this case is somewhat more complex than the usual habeas petition, it is far less complex than any capital case. I would be surprised if just getting to the petition stage in a capital case -- and doing it right -- cost less than mill and half on average. And, of course, you almost always lose, sow hen youre client dies after you have abandoned your family and spent years working 18 hour days to save him, it's sort of hard to keep doing it after a while. Ask David Boeis -- Clinton's former lawyer -- he was a capital defender in Florida, and an old anatgonist of Bob Graham. So I don't blame Dees or anyone else who has given up capital defense -- I honor them for ever having done it. I think that it is erronenous to say that capital defense plays poorly in direct mail or the public eye, btw; the ACLU and Amnbesty doesn't find that it's a loser for fundraising purposes. As to the rest of SPLC's work, I am quite happy that they are shutting down the KKK and Ayran Nations. Silverstein may not regard them as a threat, and I agree that they are not going to take over the country, but they are worthy targets. Maybe it's a hangover from Greensboro days, but I regard them as a menace. jks --- Doug Henwood [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: andie nachgeborenen wrote: Dees doesn't -- but maybe they don't like up to Kenny Boy's high standards. Ken's beef with Dees is that the SPLC has accumulated a large fortune which it hardly spends on anything but doing more direct mail and adding to the fortune. It refuses to take on capital punishment cases because they don't work well in the mail. I like Ken a lot, so I bristle at the Kenny Boy epithet. He's serious and very careful. He's not one to shoot before aiming, unlike his former collaborator. Doug __ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/
Re: In defence of Krugman and against Alexander Cockburn: choice of targets
My First Amendment prof was David Goldberger, who was the ACLU lawyer in the Skokie-Nazi case. Sorry, youw on;t find me condemning the Illinois ACLU for defending the right of the Nazis to speak. I can ask Colleen Connell (the Exec Dir of the Ill ACLU, anda friend) for your capitivating quote. I am sure I would endorse it too. I'd be proud to defend the First Amendment ina NAzi case too. It's not inconsistent to think that it's really important defend these scumbags' right tos peak, and to argue that when they step outta line and lynch someone the SPLC should shut them downw itha wrongful death lawsuit. But I'm a liberal, I told you that. The point about the ACLU, however, was it does death penalty work, and we don't find that is a fundraising disadavantage, particularly. --- ravi [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: andie nachgeborenen wrote: the ACLU and Amnbesty doesn't find that it's a loser for fundraising purposes. and to complete the circle: this is the same ACLU whose illinois chapter president was hanging out at a neo-nazi type gathering (captivating quotes on why the ACLU must truck with the extreme right, unfortunately unavailable since i am at work) as reported by... SPLC! ;-) (SPLC does note that state chapters have a lot of autonomy). --ravi __ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/
Re: In defence of Krugman and against Alexander Cockburn: choice of targets
How terrible, Dees makes soo much money, how dare he. People who work for good causesa re supposed to be POOR. You wanna guess how much Tigar makes? Or Kunstler made? I bet it wasa lot more than Dees. Hey, Louis, I'm a corporate lawyer at a big law firm; I make my living in part defending tobacco companies, and I make a lot of money too -- not as much as Dees, but I'm getting there, if I stay here, I will someday. I must be a real scumbag. And the SPLC is puting its money into propaganda, and worse, ut's not even Marxist propaganda. If =It were reprinting the marxist classics in overpriced editions, like Pathfinder Books, everything would be fine. Whatta crick. --- Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I invite pen-l'ers to look at the IRS forms for SPLC that are online at: http://www.splcenter.org/pdf/static/SPLC_IRS_990_2001.pdf It has total assets of $134 million! Dees makes $258,000 per year. The 3 people in charge of fundraising make a total of $300,000 per year. This is a big-time operation. Meanwhile, the main expense item is publications, which amounted to $5,246,665. It is likely that the brunt of this went to tolerance.org that disseminated questionnaires on campus that measured intolerance with an eye to making people more tolerant. (Arrggghh!) Here is a snippet: Who do you prefer? (Please note: Black refers to a persons primarily of African descent and White refers to persons primarily of European descent.) /_/ I prefer Black people over White people /_/ I have no preference /_/ I prefer White people over Black people Somebody is obviously getting ripped off. -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org __ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/
Re: Interview with Karl Marx
--- soula avramidis [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: this Karl Marx is tame, domesticated and suitable for a western audience so much so that he could be in few years a candidate for the pentagon cabal. Don't be silly. Just because he's not your sort of PC firebrand doesn't make someone a sellout. Actually I thought this was a very clever and rather accurate picture of Marx, working from his actual views and prejudices. He despised explicit moralizing. He look the long view. He hated the parties of his time, including the ones he worked with. He was ruthlessly unsentimental. i like the way he demeaned Slavs; there was a definite flirt with the third Reich there. The real Karl Marx had a low view of Slavs, although he revised that towards the end of his life. It is, morever, an instance, of Whosiz Law, mentioned in another post on the list today, to drag in the Nazis; a clear indication that rational discussion just stopped. Just because Marx had racial prejudices, and he he surely did, doesn't mean that he was a proto-Nazi. Most people with such prejudices are not Nazis. that democratic centralism and Hegel are simple anomalies unrelated to his thought is rather strange. Although I think the anti-Hegelian view is wrong it has a respectable pedigree. Althusser madea career out of arguing that MArx was no Hegelian. Democratic centralsim is not an expression or a concept that occurs in Marx. He has almost no discussion about the nature of the party, betond saying thatthe Communists impose no sectarian principles on the workers' movement. what is really dangerous is when Marx ceases to be the nemesis of western culture and thought. attempts to bring him into mainstream simply like any other well meaning saint whose thoughts could not be practiced is the ultimate idealist trap. Heaven forbid that anyone should learn from him; he must be maintained as the Other, The Enemy. Any acknowledgement that Marx was part of western civilization must lead to prostration before the bourgeoisie. To . . . gasp . . . bourgeois liberalism. Of course I am a bourgeois liberal myself. Marx is alive in the struggle that will bring down imperialism and will never be incorporated willy nilly into classical zestern thought. the very thought is appaulling Odd, them that Engels saw Marx has realizing the ends of classical German philosophy, and insisted that most of the elements of his thought were not original, including the importance of class, the centrality of the economy, the law of value, etc. Sorry, Soula, what's left of Marxism are elements of a pretty good theory of capitalism, a theory that is firmly rooted in the classical Western Enlightement tradition. Lenin was right about this when he talked about the three sources of Marxism: French socialism, English (Scottish) political economy, and German philosophy. The movementw ith the red banners and the hammers and sickles and the marchinhg workers -- that's over. I am as sorry about it as you, but Marx was never one for sentiment,a nd he would discourage self-deception. He would not have wanted you to be a Marxist either, a term he never used. Engels either. jks __ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/
Engels's use of the term Marxist -- and Ours
Thanks, I'd missed that. But one really has to look for it, right? Calling scientific socialism Marxism isn't something either of them did muchj, Marx, never; in a couple of letters, Engels reports that Marx rejected the label in particular contexts. I don't have the references to hand, but some of them are in my my paper that is posted on Kelly's popular culture studies website; however, my research indicated taht Marxist was originally a pejorative directed at folowers of Marx in the First International by Bakunin and his followers, and the Marxists objected. Later Kautsky made Marxist Into a term of honor. The history is interesting, but the real question is what purpose and function the term now serves. Until the mid-late 20th century, when there were self-identified Marxist states and mass workers parties that called themselves Marxist, it indicated a political affiliation with the Communist movement -- roughly the people who thought that in some sense or other the October Revolution of 1917 had been a Good Thing. Practically speaking there are no such states and movements any more, and no more of a Communist Movement. Today, the term rather indicates (1) an academic brand name, useful for classifying a theoretical position or putting material in a syllabus, and (2) as Soula's useful post indicates, an expression of extreme and angry alienation from the existing state of affairs -- unconnected, in large part, with any movement. Of course there are local self-styled Marxist and communist movements are parties here and there, some boring and harmless, like the CPUSA or the CPF (France), some quite malevolent and evil, as in Columbia's FARC or the Shining Path of Peru, a few using the name for historical reasons but with no remaining living connection to any communist revolutionary movement, such as the CPRF (Russia) or the CPC (China). But the historical basis for the appellation is no longer alive. Perhaps it is time to return to the unsentimentality of Marx, who would have had little patience for grandstanding and posturing using his name. jks --- Jurriaan Bendien [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In his foreword to his essay Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy (1886), dated February 21, 1888, Frederick Engels does use the term Marxist, namely, he claimed confidently, In the meantime, the Marxist world outlook has found representatives far beyond the boundaries of Germany and Europe and in all the literary languages of the world. Source: http://csf.colorado.edu/psn/marx/Archive/1886-ECGP/lf0.html Justin is therefore wrong if he claims that Engels did not use the term Marxist, but also correct insofar as the German original text reads: Inzwischen hat die Marxsche Weltanschauung Vertreter gefunden weit über Deutschlands und Europas Grenzen hinaus und in allen gebildeten Sprachen der Welt. The word Marxsche could be translated as either Marxian or Marxist and among English followers of Marx around the turn of the 20th century these terms were often used interchangeably. It referred specifically to Marx's view of history and economics. To my knowledge, Engels did authorise the English translation and therefore did not explicitly object to the use of the term Marxist. In fact Engels considered it appropriate that Marx's name should be attached to the new scientific, materialist interpretation of human history that had developed during the 19th century in criticism of religious-idealist interpretations, and compared Marx's achievements in social science to Darwin's achievements in natural science. Clearly, the main thrust was that of breaking through the monopoly over the knowledge about human nature, history and society by religious authorities and idealist ideologues of the ruling classes. But it is true that the old Engels himself hardly used the term Marxism in his writings, even though he sought to popularise and propagandise the new world outlook. The problem was really that whereas the old Engels sought to systematise and propagate Marx's new world view, and the same time he wanted to prevent that world view from collapsing back into a general philosophy which people would accept without independent thought or doing any real research of their own, the latter which he knew Marx hated, since Marx's point of view was that philosophical generalisations had to be transcended and replaced with empirical, scientific knowledge, reducing the field for philosophical inquiry to epistemology, logic and possibly ethics (although ethics for Marx could not be discussed separately from real practical activity, and consequently could not be discussed separately from class interests; ethics abstracted from real practical activity he considered an ideological discourse). Jurriaan __ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears
Re: Participatory Economics
Sigh. I probably should not get involved in this, but here goes. I agree with Louis on very little, but from my opposite (to his) perspective, I agree with his dismissal of parecon. I agree with you, Troy, and disagree with Louis (and Marx) that up to a point, it is valuable to develop alternative models of economic organization -- I mean valuable as an organizing tool, as a way of answering the practical question that arises in real organizing, What have you Got that's Better? But it is important to pitch the resposne at the right level of generality, and to bear in mind the things that Louis emphasizes, about how any alternative will arise in response to circumstances we cannot now imagine, and will be changed in its realization in response to the needs of the struggle. Another way to put it is to use a legal analogy: we want the sketch of a constitution, not a code of regulations. It would belp to be able to say, Yes, we have thought about what might be worth fighting for,a nd here is how me can do better and in a broad brush way avoid the mistakes of the past, bearing in mind that any actual alternatives taht comes about will certainly not look like what we can now conceive. Parecon could have been like this, but Albert and Hahnel had to make it a complete account of how in detail to reorganize the whole od social life. As such, their vision resembles that of Utoptian Socialisst whom Marx properly scorned. In particular, Robert Owen comesto mind -- he used to design the physical layout of his cooperatives, describe the principles of work-sharing, and so forth. This is silly, tedious, and pointless. It's not the job of utopian speculation to solve all the problems of social life ahead of time. The task of of modeling alternatives is rather to show that at a fairly abstract level a better alternative is possible. David Schweickart's Against Capitalism, and his more recent, Beyond Capitalism, which present market socialist models, are good illustrations of the right level of generality -- enough detail to answer the main question, but not so much as to get into the territory of science fiction. I will add two further points. One, which will be as poorly received here as it always is, is that on their own terms, AH fail to develop a credible alternative because their parecon does not have a plausible answer to the Hayek-Mises calculation problem for a nonmarket economy -- namely, the problem that such a system must be catastrophically wasteful an inefficient because it demands that the planners know too much and be able to effectively implement theirt plans, which does not seem realistic to me in a complex modern economy. The second is that, even if AH had such an alternative, their proposal does not strike me as desirable because it would involve far too much of an imposition on people's time, both in terms of involvement in planning, and in terms of micromanaging their working activity -- I mean here the balanced job complexes, which strike me as both nightmareish and impractical. In addition, the proposal is undesirable because it does not respect the privacy of people's choices -- it improperly politicizes all preferences. jks --- troy cochrane [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Louis, For everything you say, I fail to see the true critique of participatory economics. Pining for the days of Paris Commune will not bring about revolution. Offering alternatives to the status quo will. You also criticize Albert and Hahnel for their own criticisms of Trotsky's and Lenin's support for hierarchy, but you fail to defend their stances. You also fail to explain why the historical elements were to blame for Stalinism, rather than the hierarchical nature of the system. Is it not possible that these elements would not have resulted in such a brutal, totalitarian system if hierarchy was not so extreme? Troy Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Obviously, I'm a supporter of this alternative, but I'd like to hear any critiques from anyone on this list. If those on the list are supporters, I'd like to hear your thoughts or concerns. If there are those who are unaware of participatory economics -parecon, I'd be happy to post some articles written about the model. Thanks, Troy Cochrane What Marx and Engels saw as its three of main features of utopian thought were: 1) Ahistoricism: The utopian socialists did not see the class struggle as the locomotive of history. While they saw socialism as being preferable to capitalism, they neither understood the historical contradictions that would undermine it in the long run, nor the historical agency that was capable of resolving these contradictions: the working-class. 2) Moralism: What counts for the utopian socialists is the moral example of their program. If there is no historical agency such as the working-class to fulfill the role of abolishing class society, then it is up to the moral power of the utopian
Re: Participatory Economics
Sure, I don't mind. Hahnel has a long criticism of a longer statement of the views posted here years ago -- which he got second hand, and didn't forward to me, just posted himself. You could probably find it somewhere. jks --- troy cochrane [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Andie, Thanks for your response. May I forward this to Michael Albert? He encourages criticisms of parecon and I think this one is more well thought out than most. Thanks, Troy andie nachgeborenen [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Sigh. I probably should not get involved in this, but here goes. I agree with Louis on very little, but from my opposite (to his) perspective, I agree with his dismissal of parecon. I agree with you, Troy, and disagree with Louis (and Marx) that up to a point, it is valuable to develop alternative models of economic organization -- I mean valuable as an organizing tool, as a way of answering the practical question that arises in real organizing, What have you Got that's Better? But it is important to pitch the resposne at the right level of generality, and to bear in mind the things that Louis emphasizes, about how any alternative will arise in response to circumstances we cannot now imagine, and will be changed in its realization in response to the needs of the struggle. Another way to put it is to use a legal analogy: we want the sketch of a constitution, not a code of regulations. It would belp to be able to say, Yes, we have thought about what might be worth fighting for,a nd here is how me can do better and in a broad brush way avoid the mistakes of the past, bearing in mind that any actual alternatives taht comes about will certainly not look like what we can now conceive. Parecon could have been like this, but Albert and Hahnel had to make it a complete account of how in detail to reorganize the whole od social life. As such, their vision resembles that of Utoptian Socialisst whom Marx properly scorned. In particular, Robert Owen comesto mind -- he used to design the physical layout of his cooperatives, describe the principles of work-sharing, and so forth. This is silly, tedious, and pointless. It's not the job of utopian speculation to solve all the problems of social life ahead of time. The task of of modeling alternatives is rather to show that at a fairly abstract level a better alternative is possible. David Schweickart's Against Capitalism, and his more recent, Beyond Capitalism, which present market socialist models, are good illustrations of the right level of generality -- enough detail to answer the main question, but not so much as to get into the territory of science fiction. I will add two further points. One, which will be as poorly received here as it always is, is that on their own terms, AH fail to develop a credible alternative because their parecon does not have a plausible answer to the Hayek-Mises calculation problem for a nonmarket economy -- namely, the problem that such a system must be catastrophically wasteful an inefficient because it demands that the planners know too much and be able to effectively implement theirt plans, which does not seem realistic to me in a complex modern economy. The second is that, even if AH had such an alternative, their proposal does not strike me as desirable because it would involve far too much of an imposition on people's time, both in terms of involvement in planning, and in terms of micromanaging their working activity -- I mean here the balanced job complexes, which strike me as both nightmareish and impractical. In addition, the proposal is undesirable because it does not respect the privacy of people's choices -- it improperly politicizes all preferences. __ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/
Re: insurance question
--- Bill Lear [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sunday, October 26, 2003 at 15:17:02 (-0800) Michael Perelman writes: Does anybody know of a nice thumbnail history of insurance? Much broader that just insurance, see Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk by Peter L. Bernstein For insurance specifically see: http://www.business.com/directory/financial_services/insurance/reference/history/ including items like: Insurance History Historical topics include Insurance in America, History of Farm Mutuals, and History of Crop Insurance provided by the Kathy Bayes Insurance Agency of Bastrop County Texas http://www.trgc.com/center/history.htm http://www.mifassoc.org/swpapsearch/bghistory.html http://insurance.about.com/cs/insurancehistory/ Insurance: Books Historical Information Accidentally, on Purpose: The Making of a Personal Injury Underworld in America by Ken Dornstein From Kirkus Reviews This thoroughgoing, even encyclopedic, history of insurance fraud in America is a first-rate, ripping yarn. With its machines and speed and bustle, the Industrial Revolution saw a horrendous rise in accident rates. Train wrecks, street-car collisions, the dangerous chaos of the city, all spawned an almost endless series of mishaps. As Dornstein (a young, former private investigator specializing in insurance scams) ably demonstrates, it wasn't a far step from genuine accidents to the emergence of increasingly sophisticated and outrageous fakery--the money was just too good. He presents a Damon Ruyonesque cast of colorful rascals, from apple-peel specialists (dropping fruit peels and slipping profitably) to floppers, tumblers, and whiplashers... -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. The Blues: A History of the Blue Cross and Blue Shield System by Robert M., Jr Cunningham, Rosemary A. Stevens From The New England Journal of Medicine, December 3, 1998 In this era of intense market-driven competition among health plans, with nonprofit organizations becoming less distinguishable from their for-profit counterparts, it is easy to forget the origins of private health insurance in the United States and the early notions of prepayment that accompanied them. The birth of the Blue Cross organization and its strong commitment to community service are recounted in The Blues. ...The book, by a father-and-son team, is a comprehensive and balanced account of the Blue Cross organization, from its inspired beginnings under Justin Ford Kimball at Baylor's University Hospital in 1929 to its present-day role as a major force in American health care... http://www.ma.org/History/WhoOwnsWhat/Pages/Jon_Andie/history.html http://insurance.about.com/cs/insurancehistory/index_2.htm __ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/
Re: Urgent Appeal from Berkeley Stop the War Coalition
My letter: 22 October 2003 Dear Sirs, I am writing as an attorney and a citizen in connection with the matters of Rachel Odes, Snehal Shingavi, and Michael Smith, whom the University of California has convicted before a disciplinary committee for action relating to their involvement in nonviolence civil disobedience protesting the war on Iraq. The defendants sat in at Sproul Hall at Berkeley on March 20, 2003, and have been convicted of participating in an illegal assembly and refusing to cooperate with university officials. It is bitterly ironic that Berkeley, home of the Free Speech movement, should find itself once more in the position of persecuting free speech and nonviolent political protest. Peaceful civil disobedience is, or ought to be, an honored tradition in this country, since the days of Martin Luther King and indeed the Berkeley Fre Speech movement. It is irrelevant that the students were right to protest an illegal war, irrelevant that they were right in retrospect that the war was based on lies. Even looking forward, they were acting as responsible citizens, indeed as persons willing to take the consequences of their actions -- in this instance, an arrest and fine for trespass. The university's additional prosecution is meant to have a chilling effect on free speech and politicala ctivity that is disturbing in light of current tendencies by public officials to stifle speech -- for example, the threat by Ohio State University officials last year to expel students who legally turned their back on President Buas as a commencement speaker. The universities are sipposed to stand as a bulwark between the scholarly community, including the students, and the Ashcrofts and Rumsfelds. This action does not promote those ends or fulfill that purpose. My information indicates, moreover, that there were grave due process problems with the University prosecution -- refusal to have an open trial, refusal to to give students ample time to prepare a defense, failure to serve one student with notice of the complaint, refusal to share evidence with the defense, and selective prosecution. The University is a public institution, and counsel must have advisedit that ordinary norms of procedural due process apply. I encourage the University to stand for free speech, civil liberties, and due process; ideally, to vacate the conviction and drop the prosecution, at the minimum to offer a proper hearing to those charged. Sincerely, Justin Schwartz, Esq. Jones Day* (Chicago) 77 W. Wacker Drive Chicago, IL JD '98 (Ohio State*) PhD '89 (Michigan*) * For identification purposes only --- Michael Hoover [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Date: Sun, 19 Oct 2003 03:08:58 -0700 (PDT) From: Adam Turl [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Fw: URGENT APPEAL FROM THE BERKELEY STOP THE WAR COALITION To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] * please forward widely * Dear friends: The University of California has found three students - Rachel Odes, Snehal Shingavi, and Michael Smith - guilty of participating in an illegal assembly and refusing to cooperate with university officials for their involvement in the anti-war sit-in that took place in Sproul Hall on March 20, 2003. Not only does this mark an attack on anti-war protesters and people of conscience throughout the country, the entire process from start to finish has been riddled with unfairness and makes a mockery of anything resembling justice. The problems with the sham of a hearing are almost too many to list: the university refused to have an open trial (until we showed up with forty protesters); the university refused to give students ample time to prepare a defense; one of the three students wasn't even served with a letter telling her to appear at the hearing; the students were unable to gather witnesses in time for the hearing (some of them are out of the country and a few have graduated); the university did not make all of their evidence available to our advocate; the university has singled out three protesters from over 400 who participated in the sit-in and the 119 who were arrested that day for selective prosecution; the university selected an all male hearing panel to adjudicate the hearing; and the students' request for a continuance was ignored. Instead of being a party to this kangaroo court, students walked out of the hearings in protest and demanded that the university at least consider giving them more time to prepare. The university refused. Other than the blatant disregard for procedure, there are two things that make this decision by UC Berkeley outrageous. First, that UC Berkeley is the only university in the nation (to our knowledge) that is prosecuting students for protesting the war the day after the bombing began, despite the fact that protests happened on scores of campuses throughout the US.. Second, that student protesters were right about every aspect of the war. There are no
Re: california/iraq
Brilliant! Klar! --- Dan Scanlan [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: der Gropenfuehrer I like this term. It's a good one to use for a hands-on governor. Cartoonist Dan O'Neill points out in his latest strip that der Gropenfuerhrer (Jim's term, not Dan's) is married to the only Kennedy with a mustache. Dan Scanlan __ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search http://shopping.yahoo.com
Re: The War on Terror is a war on rights
What's yer problem, Hanly, guy's a towlhead, right? All towlheads are terrorists and should be tortured to avenge Syria's attack on the World Trade Center, and also for hiding Saddam Hussein's WMD so we can't find them. If you have done anything, you should't mind being disappeared and tortured for a greater good. We have to wipe out evcery vestife of extremism and terroris, root it out, no matter what the cost, to preserve our freedom,a nd anyway, it isn't like the huy was white. Besides, he's a Canucka s well asa Towlhead, and all you Canucks are commies, you have national health and you didn't help us in Iraq. You called the president a moron, so of course we're gonna deport you to be tortyured by our friend in Syria, who will help us find out who did the Twin Towers thing, because we can't do torture ourselves, that would be wrong, even if it is only a commie Canuck Muslim fundamentalist terrorist. Some intesnse interrogation, tahtw ould be OK, sleep deprivation, thats ort of thing. Blowtorches to the balls, let the towlheads do it to each other, tell su what they find out. jks --- k hanly [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: This is from CBC news. Outside of Canada there seems little coverage of this particularly nasty case of just snatching someone who was changing planes and then no doubt farming him out to Syria to see if they could extract useful info from him by torture. It is ironic that the US authorities would send him to Syria a country the US accuses of supporting terrorism rather than Canada where we are supposedly just a bit sloppy in letting them slip through to the US! Cheers, Ken Hanly Canadian freed from Syrian jail happy to be home Last Updated Mon, 06 Oct 2003 21:37:24 MONTREAL - Maher Arar's return to Canada is the beginning of his hunt for justice, his wife says. Maher, 33, arrived at Montreal's Dorval Airport Monday afternoon. The Canadian citizen was jailed in Syria, where he was born, for 374 days after U.S immigration officials arrested him in New York and deported him last fall. At a brief new conference at Dorval, Arar talked about his children and my fellow Canadians who have contributed and helped me get back home. He said he was excited to see his family. My kids grew up in the last year. FROM OCT. 21, 2002: Missing Ottawa engineer turns up in Syria But his wife, Monia Mazigh, said her husband's terrible tragedy isn't over yet. It's just the beginning of justice for my husband. Maher Arar speaks to the media Arar was first detained by U.S. authorities in September 2002 while he was changing planes in New York. He was travelling from Tunisia to Canada. U.S. authorities said his name was on a terrorist list and they suspected him of being a member of al-Qaeda. After 10 days, they deported him, not to Canada but to to his native Syria. While he has both Syrian and Canadian citizenship, he hasn't lived in Syria for more than 15 years. Arar was jailed upon his return to Syria, but not formally charged. Both Amnesty International and Mazigh had lobbied hard to keep Canadian officials focused on the case. FROM SEPT. 25, 2003: RCMP leaves MPs in dark about Arar case His case has been shrouded in confusion. There have been suggestions he was tortured in Syria, and questions about the RCMP's role, if any, in passing information to U.S. authorities. Arar, a software engineer from Ottawa, appears to be in good health. Written by CBC News Online __ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search http://shopping.yahoo.com
Re: immigration question...urgent
This is not a legal concept in immigration law. In ordinary language, you speak not of 1st gen immigrants, but simply of immigrants. You speak of 1st gen Americans -- you daughter, my grandparents, except for my paternal grandmother, who was an immigrant, born in Russian Poland. I am a 3d gen AMerican, born to 2d gen Americans (mostly). jks --- joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: OK. My parents emigrated to the USA. I was born in Romania and came with them. My sister was born in the USA. Are my parents first generation immigrants? or 0th generation? Is my sister first generation or second generation? You get the drift? How exactly do you define first, second, nth generation of immigrants? It's urgent cause my sister is taking a state test tomorrow and it might come up. Thanks, Joanna __ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search http://shopping.yahoo.com
Re: Bush failing?
Like with McCarthy -- all the awful shit he did, but he went down when he attacked the Army. can't go after the core imperialist institutions! Still, it is lovely to see the bastards squirm. When Rove's head goes up on a Bushie pike -- if the accusations tick, he's gotta go -- I'm gonna cheer. jks --- Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Does anybody know why, with all the terrible things the Bushits have done that the Joseph Wilson affair has gotten so much traction? Also, as I have mentioned before, the economy seems quite weird, with some positive signs, and other strong indications of stagnation. I thought that Joanna's article about about the Ponzi economy seemed right on target, even though nobody commented on it. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] __ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search http://shopping.yahoo.com
Re: Rush Limbaugh
In the same way, Princeon helped makea red out of me. My reaction to my smug, dumb, self-assuredly-entitled classmates was, What makes THESE assholes think they have a God-given right to run the world? Which (a) they were certain they had, and (b) in fact exercised whether they had it or not. jks --- Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: In this case, the _ad hominem_ is quite relevant. If you want to understand the Bush team, the fact that it's centered on someone whose had every advantage in life handed to him - Andover, Yale, Harvard, inherited money and position - and he's still a provincial ignoramus says something about their policies. The Bushwackers do absolutely everything for those with every advantage handed to them (tax cuts, etc.) while expecting the great unwashed masses to do their dirty work for them (including fighting and dying in Iraq). Bush's arrogance -- and that of his team -- reminds me of the preppies I encountered at Yale, who thought that the world was their oyster. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: Bill Lear [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Thursday, October 02, 2003 1:29 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Rush Limbaugh On Thursday, October 2, 2003 at 16:13:28 (-0400) Doug Henwood writes: ... Oh come on. What's wrong with a little ad hominem, especially with such a gang of thugs? Here's a guy with every advantage in life handed to him - Andover, Yale, Harvard, inherited money and position - and he's still a provincial ignoramus. Marx never had any problem with making fun of his enemies. My difficulty with ad hominem is that it is something I can't share in conversations with others who do not share my viewpoint about the behavior of these thugs; and usually the ad hominem is led with, not used as the concluding exclamation point on a set of well-reasoned attacks on someone's behavior. Besides, I'm a provincial ignoramus on any number of fronts myself. Bill __ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search http://shopping.yahoo.com
Re: Dysentery
I knew Sandy back when he was a human being, not getting tenure at Princeton. Now he's Texan gun-nut scholar and defender of torture. Ugh, jks --- Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Sanford Levinson, The Debate on Torture: War Against Virtual States: I would adopt some version of the view articulated by Michael Walzer in his essay The Problem of Dirty Hands, (War and Moral Responsibility, op. cit.) where he explicitly endorses the necessity of having political leaders who are willing, in dire circumstances, to engage in horrendous actions, including torture. http://www.dissentmagazine.org/ === Woody Allen, Annie Hall: ALVY (Taking Robin's hand) I'm so tired of spending evenings making fake insights with people who work for Dysentery. ROBIN Commentary. ALVY Oh, really, I heard that Commentary and Dissent had merged and formed Dysentery. -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org __ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search http://shopping.yahoo.com
Re: Dysentery
Ahem. Real liberals (in America) are card-carrying members of the ACLU like me who stand foresquare for the Rights of Man, the Bill of Rights, due process, equal protection, and against torture -- come what may. Levinson, who has made a name for himself as a 2d Amendment (gun rights) scholar, is no liberal and has not been for 20 years. Dershowitz is of course a Zionist, which sort of makes inroads into liberalism, since you have to defend the opposite when Israel does it. jks --- Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: You've lost me Louis, are you arguing for the necessity of torture? Joanna No, Dissent Magazine is. Sanford Levinson basically wrote a defense of Alan Dershowitz there using formulations that were a bit less crude. If you watch Dershowitz's debate with Norman Finkelstein, you'll see a bit of casuistry around the acceptability of soft torture like keeping depriving people of sleep, etc. This is the sinkhole of social democracy and liberalism that some on the left are trying to accomodate themselves to. I am afraid that American fascism will not come in jackboots but in Birkenstocks. Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org __ Do you Yahoo!? The New Yahoo! Shopping - with improved product search http://shopping.yahoo.com
