(this article describes how the forces of imperialism literally poison
people to death, which over time may make official war casualty rates look
like chickenfeed - and I am not talking tobacco. The poisoning would also
affect American and British soldiers stationed in Iraq - JB).
(...) American
$4 trillion swindle foiled by spelling error
PAUL VALLELY (Independent)
LONDON - Every Monday morning 69-year-old Graham Halksworth would bid
farewell to his wife and leave his home at the top end of the little town of
Mossley, high on the shoulder of the Pennines. Smartly dressed and carrying
a
02.11.2003
JERUSALEM - Israeli forces will soon be able to carry out demolition of
Palestinian buildings by remote control, an Israeli high-tech concern said.
Palestinians and human rights groups, including Amnesty International,
condemn demolitions as collective punishment that has made
02.11.2003 NEW YORK - The UN General Assembly has approved the world's first
anti-corruption treaty that requires nations to return stolen assets to
countries from which they were pillaged. The treaty, two years in the
drafting, will enter into force 90 days after 30 governments have ratified
it.
Lack the time to go into the subject just now, but try:
http://www.palgrave-usa.com/catalogue/index.asp?isbn=0312211643
Editor's note: BBC investigative reporter Greg Palast is also the author of
the recent bestseller The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, a look at the
American political process. He is also one of two journalists who obtained a
document from the administration of US President George Bush titled Moving
One of the most common accusations levelled against the US-led occupation is
that it was simply paving the way for a subsequent corporate invasion.
Monolithic US companies with strong ties to the administration of US
President George Bush have been handed huge contracts to repair the damage
Ian,
I think of it in the same way as intellectual property rights, about which I
have written already. IPR required an objective theory of property, and in
fact a true theory of capitalism as we know it. But if there is some facet
or relation of capitalism which you cannot admit in your theory,
The new Iraqi dinar is rising against the US dollar, the old banknotes being
changed to new bills printed in England, by a consortium led by UK-based
banknote printer De La Rue. The new currency was was unveiled in Baghdad on
October 4, 2003 and introduced on October 15, and Iraqis have three
I wrote:
They hope that they will
get sex for nothing, and they hope that for the rest people will notice,
and
they will say that according to the contract, employer is entitled to the
full labour-power of the employee, i.e. all potential and observable
behaviours.
That should be for the
I wrote:
But I know what you are talking about, because in 1991 my landlord caught me
reading Marx and said to be Yeah, I knew a Marxist once and he was
constantly drunk and unhappy.
1991 should be 1981 - typo.
J
1. Tax cuts are responsible for economic growth, says Bush
``The tax relief we passed is working,'' Mr. Bush claimed in Columbus, Ohio
on October 30 to whoops of approval from several hundred workers during a
speech at an aluminium processing plant here (NYT, Oct. 31). The news that
real GDP had
Krugman is not left-liberal. He is a neo-liberal, appearing in
sharp distinction to the hard-core right-wingers that dominate public
policy presently. His critical inquiry is pretty shallow, consisting
mostly of currently calling Bush and his gang on their blatant
falsehoods. When
Marty wrote:
The danger
comes of course because [Krugman] is not advancing any kind of radical
vision
of change.
What bloody danger, for heaven's sake ? Who is creating the danger ? When
two million humans die in Iraq because of the total effects of war
destruction and economic chaos in two
Jim wrote:
Now PK attacks only the right -- because there isn't much of a Left left.
This is
a sign of the rightward shift of the middle.
That is exactly it, couldn't have said it better and I am not even an
American. Question I am raising is, what is the response to that.
J.
Okay, so Krugman explains where the spectacular GDP growth mainly came from:
- final demand excluding the increase in stocks actually grew faster than
GDP.
- housing grew at a 20 percent rate
- spending on consumer durables rose at a 27 percent rate last quarter.
- consumers take advantage of
What I forgot to mention is that the Kaleckian political business cycle
concept links Jim's comment about the rightward shift of the middle to
the consumer spending boom that mainly account for the big quarterly GDP
increase. So then you have a materialist explanation for the political
drift.
J.
On the Left, it used to be said that nothing is too good for the
working class. This applied to folks
who had escaped that class, too. Absent an immediate revolution, who
wouldn't want to escape?
Yes and no. There was a phrase among british workers, bloody jump-ups.
Where I came from, it
Okay Doug,
A major prop to consumption in the U.S. over the last 2-3 years has
been home equity withdrawals - borrowing against the appreciated
value of owner-occupied housing. Since 68% of U.S. households own
their dwellings, your definition of propertied would have to be
rather broad.
Thanks.
An odd feature of the U.S. housing boom is that the rental index
hasn't gone up all that much - $46b gain between 2000 and 2001
(latest available). The annual GDP tables have data on imputations -
specifically 8.21, at
The average Chinese worker currently gets paid about US$900-US$1000 (per
capita GDP is estimated at US$791, total GDP is $991 billion; operating
surplus averages about 22 percent, which UBS Warburg thinks too low, it's
lower than the USA), but the average output per worker is about US$6800
(this
Some useful introductions to Marx's economic ideas are:
Ben Fine (1989) Marx's Capital, Macmillan, 3rd Edition (the briefest)
Duncan Foley (1986) Understanding Capital: Marx's Economic Theory, Harvard
University Press.
Geoffrey Kay (1979), The Economic Theory of the Working Class,
The bureaucratic machine swings in motion. The Senate Intelligence Committee
of the US Senate now gives the CIA 48 hours to supply files on intelligence
it gathered on Iraq prior to the start of the military campaign. The
deadline was communicated by Pat Roberts and John Rockefeller, in a response
What is the growth area in the United States labour market ? Answer: casual
labour. 122,000 seasonally adjusted jobs in temporary help employment were
added since April. This sector tends to be a sensitive indicator for overall
employment movements. Global Insight estimates that more than 93% of
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
Alexander Cockburn, whom I traditionally respect and admire, now writes:
Krugman is a press agent, a busker, for Clintonomics. For him as for so
many others on the liberal side, the world only went bad in January, 2001.
If a Democrat, pretty much any Democrat conventional enough to win Wall
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. It is just that I do not have the
literature handy here anymore, and I am too preoccupied to go to
Germany, France and Russia - Europe's leading opponents to the US-led war in
Iraq - today agreed to vote in favour of the UN resolution on Iraq that
Washington hopes will attract troops and money to stabilise the country.
The decision was made during a 45-minute conference call with the German
Donors to pledge $2 billion for Iraq
Wednesday 15 October 2003, 2:19 Makka Time, 23:19 GMT
About two billion dollars is expected to be pledged for Iraqi reconstruction
at a donors conference in Madrid later this month, a UN official has said.
Julia Taft, assistant administrator of the UN
My analysis is that the media people are bored. They are bored, because
within the framework of censorship and editing that they operate under (God
Bless America, defender of the free world !), they just get to do all these
boring stories about the fight against terror, how the US government can
In any case, the Green Party needs to prioritize where its activists
should spend their time and energy, mapping the political geography
of race and class, and to set numerical targets (how many campaign
workers, how many votes, etc. in each precinct), in order to garner
more than 2-5% of the
Because bourgeois economists understand economic and social indicators
differently from socialists, have Cuban universities actually made an
attempt to find an expression of social facts about their society as
economic indicators which foreign economists could understand, to facilitate
Al Jazeera reports (14 November) that Condoleezza Rice stated that:
We know there are a lot of people who are using the travel opportunities to
go to Cuba in ways that wind up enriching the Cuban government because the
Cubans are able to take the money in hard currency to then pay the workers
I have to say that it is curious to me to have a country [like Iraq - JB]
whose per capita income, GDP, is about $800 ... that a county that poor
should be required to pay reparations to countries whose per capita GDP is a
factor of 10 times that for a war which all of the Iraqis who are now in
The UN Oil-for-Food program was launched in 1996 in a bid to alleviate the
genocidal sanctions imposed on Iraq after the 1991 Gulf War. On 29 September
this year, the Executive Director of the UN Office of the Iraq Programme
(OIP), Benon Sevan said that the terrorist bombing of UN headquarters in
Basically the banks are arguing your love gimme such a thrill, but your
love don't pay my bills, so gimme money, that's what I want. (actually John
Lennon was sick in the plane prior to performing this song at the Live
Peace in Toronto concert in 1969).
Suppose that you are or feel dependent for
Yes. The Federal Reserve orchestrated the bailout of the hedge fund Long
Term Capital Management, using $3.5 billion provided by the private sector.
See:
www.t-bird.edu/pdf/about_us/case_series/e06990020.pdf
Peter Fisher was the moving force behind Bush's Presidential Commission on
the U.S.
(Thanks to Richard H. for making me aware of this important article, which
every socialist should read; I have excerpted the important bits and
slightly edited it - JB)
This coming October 23 to 24, the United States will be sitting down with
rich creditor countries, the International Monetary
Empires do die because something in human
nature either revolts or cannot thrive in this kind of environment.
I agree totally with your sentiments, but you may not be correct on this
point. Suppose that instead of getting people to revolt, you get them to
mutate in some way, let's think of a
In my previous post on Marxmail I left out one important point. This point
is, that in accounting for Iraq ONLY on the basis of assets and liabilities,
which is the Colin Powell argument, it is important to understand the
effects of revaluing assets in the account.
The christian fundamentalist
Youssef's brother Redouane visited us tonight, and I had a conversation with
him in the kitchen, in bad German, telling him about the financial
accounting for war costs in Iraq was developing (Redouane has worked for
Moroccan banks implementing digitalised financial management systems) by
Yes, the Life is Beautiful argument. (That Italian movie where a
clownish man acts out in order to convince his son that a concentration
camp is not a concentration camp. I couldn't force myself to see it, but
apparently that was the plot)...or perhaps Schindler's List, where the
essential
Your question:
Not arguing, just asking...how is primitive accumulation in Iraq
different from any sort of colonial rule and appropriation?
Well technically there is a legal difference, because Iraq is not legally
annexed as in the past, we just go there and take it over, and also there is
an
Dutch Prince swaps throne for love
Friday 10 October 2003, 21:59 Makka Time, 18:59 GMT
Dutch Prince Johan Friso, second in line to the throne, gave up his
succession rights after the Dutch government refused him permission to marry
his fiancee Mabel Wisse Smit. Dutch Prime Minister Jan Peter
As usual, I agree with Jim's comments, except that I would add that Capital
Volume 2 may sometimes also have relevance for research into specific
primary products, insofar as the production of just one or two products may
constitute an economic sector which link to other economics sectors. When I
In his little book of 1974 called The Second Slump (later, expanded edition:
La Crise), Ernest Mandel already remarks that agricultural prices are not
formed in the same way as industrial prices, and refers to Marx's theory of
absolute and differential rents. A significant increase or decrease in
A third party on the left in an electoral system like the United
States' can never rise to power without a prior collapse of the
political party controlled by the ruling class that had captured
working-class votes (the Democratic Party, in the case of the United
States).
We'll see about
Best just to be a revolutionary and try to develop
soldarity where you can, at work, in the streets and
everywhere you go. Sure, vote for whomever you like,
but nobody is going anywhere until the working class
organizes to take power for itself.
Thanks for your advice, but I am not
the real action has to involve the development of a mass movement of the
left, something that will never come from the DP. Only when there's a
working-class movement outside of the electoral arena will the political
balance shift back in the human direction.
Jim
We had this whole dispute
Sorry, all I know about that one, is the bit by Bob Dylan,
Oh Mama, can this really be the end
To be stuck here with my mobile phone
With the Memphis blues again
J.
One thing worse than a two-party political system is a one-party system.
Ellen Frank
Disagree, haha. What is worse is when you have a one party system, or a two
party system, but the government simply disregards any party in what it
does, such that, for example, just a few people decide the
It is difficult to quantify, but from spending much time there, my estimate
would be that the typical Swiss spends perhaps 50 to 75 percent more time
per week than a comparable Western European adult on civic, church, and
other volunteer activities, and say 25 to 35 percent more than a typical
By far the most economically sensible thing to do would be to raise property
taxes (...) voters consider Proposition 13 [still] to be sacrosanct,
whatever state law says about balancing budgets. (...) Mr Schwarzenegger['s]
margin for manoeuvre is extremely limited. California very much depends on
The same employers who hailed the downfall of the Socialist Unity Party
government in East Germany, where piece wages were a regular practice, also
opposed the shorter working week in Western Europe and the USA.
In the post-Fordist world within the developed capitalist countries, the
majority of
The Southbeach Diet Online commercial in the middle of the article is more
interesting than what Chrissie Hitchens says.
Listen to this guy: my own recent visit to Baghdad, Karbala, and Najaf, as
well as to Basra and then Kurdistan, I would say that I saw persuasive
evidence of the unleashing of
A person whose mother tongue is a semetic languange,
like Hebrew or Arabic.
I had to laugh a lot when I read that one.
Mike, you're winner, that made my day.
J.
One of the things I found interesting about this, is that Dr Frederickson
said that:
Positive emotions (...) broaden ways of thinking beyond our regular
baseline, and they accumulate.
Notice here the word accumulate, and where have we heard that before ?
J.
I don't think it is such a bad analysis, really, except that it is from an
investor's point of view and therefore reactive, i.e. socio-economic events
happen, and then you adjust your portfolio holdings. Which is the modern
conception of government action as well: price movements create certain
Clearly, the Trilateral countries have a substantial number of significant
interests at stake with China. (...) This necessitates having a sense of
priorities and a strategy for encouraging the desired Chinese responses. The
priorities recommended in this report are in the security and economic
'Marxism represents a further vital, and creative stage in the maturing of
man's universal vision. Marxism is simultaneously a victory of the external,
active man over the inner, passive man, and a victory of reason over
belief...'
Zbigniew Brzezinski, Between Two Ages: America's Role in the
Carl Jung has some advice for our troubled times, which consists in
spiritual reform, in other words, the oppressed of this earth need a good
dose of spirituality for their salvation. Thus, he said in the wake of the
second world war:
Everything possible has been done for the outside world:
Weren't there a lot of people on the left in to
eugenics back in the early parts of the 20th Century?
Yes, for example Trotsky moots the possibility - his argument was that we
would want to prevent malformed and badly formed children as much as
possible in the future using scientific knowledge.
2 October 2003 - Socialist Party parliamentarians Jan Marijnissen and Krista
van Velzen stood in front of a class at their old school a few days ago, to
teach a lesson about biotechnology. They did this under the auspices of a
campaign of the Animal Awake Foundation in which filmstar Georgina
Hi Jo,
You make such interesting comments...
Very true. Which makes me wonder about the left propensity for gloom.
The only radicals that speak of hope these days are the Zapatistas.
Wonder why?
This is a very big topic. I think from personal experience it has to do
with, among other things,
Max wrote:
Anti-semitism nears complete redefinition as opposition
to Israeli policies. Anything you say otherwise has been
redefined as inconsequential. But if you're a critic of
Zionism, the slightest thing is grounds for opprobrium.
It's really remarkable. Not good for the Jews, I would
The Good Lord Jesus is sitting on his donkey, riding to Golgotha. A crowd of
people stands by, cheering. All of a sudden, the donkey stops, and
stubbornly refuses to move on. A Roman soldier whips the donkey, to get the
donkey to move, and whips Jesus a bit for good measure, causing blood to
well
Eastern union
Spurred on by an unravelling of the rules about tying the knot, people in
China are rushing to wed, writes Jonathan Watts
Friday October 3, 2003
If the Chinese media are to be believed, a great deal of jujubes will be
consumed this week. The Chinese dates, along with lotus seeds
Hi Jim,
Thanks very much (I haven't gone outside yet, just reading your post).
the standard macro explanation points to Okun's Law, which says that for
the US,
real GDP has to increase at about 3 per cent per year simply to keep the
unemployment rate constant. This type of growth counteracts
Thanks to you all for all your input into this weighty discussion, I am a
little wheezy though, must quit smoking (how could Marx pack in all those
cigars ???).
Here's a quote from Freeman Louca, As Time Goes By (Oxford University
Press, p. 274:
B.H. Klein showed that in 1900, steam and
Hi Jim,
Or is unemployment not lower in NZ? If unemployment didn't fall, then
that contradicts
the orthodoxy.
Real unemployment is difficult for me to estimate momentarily, because of
the compilation of data and statistical presentation. For example, if you
just worked a few hours a week
No intellectual property rights, no censorship vs. intellectual property
rights AND censorship.
Why do we end up with BOTH intellectual property rights AND censorship ?
Such are the mysteries of the rich in a capitalist, class-divided society
dependent on exploitation and expropriation.
J.
Cde Macdonald Stainsby draw my attention to this site:
http://www.bartcop.com/diebold.htm
The Boomtown Rats were formed in Dun Laoghaire, near Dublin, Ireland, in
1975 by a former journalist Bob Geldof (vocals - born 5 Oct. 1954), Johnnie
Fingers (keyboards - real name John Moylett, born 10,
Positive emotions don't necessarily narrow people toward a specific action,
like negative emotions do. Positive emotions seem to broaden people's
repertoires of things they like to pursue. They broaden ways of thinking
beyond our regular baseline, and they accumulate. And that broadening allows
I think that a snap-shot impression in political poll results says very
little, particularly as political variables are so much more prone to
volatility. Therefore, I think it is always important to look at the trend
in polling results over time, and consider what specific intervention would
One of the implications of this the tendency for an accelerated
hollowing-out and destruction of state institutions. If you use the state to
transfer a lot of net income from the working class to the employing class,
with Keynesian instruments, plus run up enormous financial debts at the same
World oil and gas supplies are headed for a production crunch sometime
between 2010 and 2020 when they cannot meet supply, because global reserves
are 80 per cent smaller than had been thought, new forecasts show.
An analysis presented this week at the University of Uppsala in Sweden
suggests
The painful reality the IMF ignores
The fund has again failed in its most urgent task - to reform itself
Joseph Stiglitz
Thursday October 2, 2003
The Guardian
It is six years since the IMF's fateful meeting in Hong Kong, just before
the global financial crisis. I was there. What a peculiar
Has anyone ever done a really comprehensive quantitative world study of the
political economy of cars ? I did a quick probe a while ago, but has
somebody actually very comprehensively estimated all the different sides of
the story ?
The car industry is a very important sector of the world economy,
America's new-found
protectionism is rooted in the election-year angst of the jobless
recovery.
The forces of free trade are silent - unwilling to be characterised as
anti-worker in this climate.
Is anybody actually explaining thoroughly how it is possible to have a
jobless recovery at all ?
I wrote a book that tried to discuss this possibility
Yes, it's a great book too, I would recommend it. In Michael's books you
always learn something new. I gave my copy to a professor in England (who
taught me in New Zealand in 1980), who was writing a paper on modern-day
intellectual battles
North Korea to continue nuke programme
Tuesday 30 September 2003, 10:46 Makka Time, 7:46 GMT
North Korea has said it is no longer interested in holding further
negotiations with the United States and will take practical measures to
increase its nuclear capabilities. Officials did not disclose
In Amsterdam, I met a Russian prostitute once whose name was really Natasha.
When she told me, I said No kidding, and she showed me her identification
to prove it. She wasn't trafficked though, it was more an individual
entrepreneurial activity. In Amsterdam she could make a net income of maybe
a
Well I have never prostituted myself sexually as a sex worker, but I have
paid money for sex, for various survival reasons, but I regard it basically
as lack of competency on my part. But I had a lot of people mucking round
with me to change me, and I just thought of Jesus and did it. When people
Here's a lyric from the Australian popgroup Mi-sex called Computer games
I fidget with the digit dots and cry an anxious tear
As the XU-1 connects the spot
But the matrix grid don't care
Get a message to my mother
What number would she be
There's a million angry citizens
Looking down their tubes
I just watched the TV news, which featured a clip about the Dutch Queen
Beatrix opening a nuclear waste disposal plant in Vlissingen, in the Dutch
province of Zealand (close to the Belgian border), which will store waste
from the remaining nuclear power plant we have here, for a hundred years.
The
The Rolling Stones album Some Girls was originally released June 9, 1978.
I lost my virginity then, so the Rolling Stones were way ahead of me. The
album went to number 1 in the US pop charts and number 2 in the UK pop
charts. The album sold around 8 million copies. The original album cover for
Hi Carrol,
I've had enough pain in my life to make the vision of pain without hope
(or even the ability to express one's pain) about the worst that can be.
I am shocked to hear that, and hope you do not feel like that now anymore.
If however you do still feel that, I wish you a speedy recovery
This Monday, 29 September, Socialist Party leader and parliamentarian Jan
Marijnissen (b. 8 october 1952) makes his debut as club DJ, at theatre cafe
Bittersweet in Amsterdam (Spuistraat nr. 2) during the Collected Works
week - an evening at which wellknown Dutch people are invited to be DJ for a
Rakesh, you wrote:
Marx's reproduction schema do not show even the possibility of
capitalism as an intrinsically stable dynamical system. How could
they? They assume a constant OCC, fixed values, annual turnover,
exchange at value (rather than price of production)? They are too far
removed from
by Jurriaan Bendien, Amsterdam.
/assertions in this piece being
applied to the process of globalization (privatization of international
commons) and the controversy about whether 1) it is necessary and why 2)
it does (not) result in any gain for the working class.
Joanna
Jurriaan Bendien wrote:
Rakesh, you wrote:
Marx's
What then caused the severe internal struggle about the strategy to be
followed during the war ?
(...) Using military force, effectively requires departing from the
POLITICAL dynamic and following the so-called PRINCIPLES OF WAR identified
by post-Napoleonic military writers a century and a half
Bush asks OPEC not to hurt US
Friday 26 September 2003, 2:44 Makka Time, 23:44 GMT
One day after OPEC's surprise decision to cut oil supplies, US President
George Bush pressed Saudi Arabia and other cartel members not to act in ways
that threaten the American economy. (...) My reaction is that I
(one of the reasons why secular bourgeois ideology is mystified by Islam,
and panics about it, is because it exists and persists semi-autonomously
from markets and legal rules, in other words in the sphere of civil society,
which the bourgeoisie with great pride claims to have created, and where
I am pro-choice, I am pro-affirmative action, I am pro-environment,
pro-health
- Wesley Clark, Democratic candidate, quoted in:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uselections2004/story/0,13918,1050721,00.html
I still cannot get really recent data on the New Zealand private overseas
debt, showing who owes it and to whom it is owed, this is one of those
delicate subjects in bourgeois political economy, that is shrouded in a bit
of mystery. The NZ Statistics Dept that I worked for 1991-1994, provides on
(Bob) Dylan said the answer was 'blowin' in the wind.'
I think many of us felt that wind. I know I did. I had been the J-5,
responsible for advising General Shalikashvili on our UN policies in 1994,
when we stood by as nearly a million Africans were hacked to death with
machetes in Rwanda. I had
Published on Tuesday, October 29, 2002 in The Nation's On-Line Beat
Bob Dylan, Dick Cheney and Paul Wellstone
by John Nichols
Most Americans had no idea where Eveleth, Minnesota, was until they
saw the maps showing where Senator Paul Wellstone, his wife and daugher,
three
I was thinking about this question of whether the Left should help the
Democratic Party to defeat Bush, on the ground that this would improve the
world situation. And I had to think of my own experience of general
elections for parliament in New Zealand (I was involved a modest way in
several
Ever read Foucault's book Discipline and Punish ? Now don't tell me that
books don't have influence, and that ideas don't travel. Check this out:
http://www.eetimes.com/story/OEG20020104S0044
and this:
http://www.aimglobal.org/technologies/
I already mentioned on PEN-L how the British middle
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