Re: Reductionism/Immortality
--- Carrol Cox [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Jurriaan Bendien wrote: Dearest Joanna, I honestly and firmly believe that what you say here is bunk. But I will do you the honour of investigating it some more. After all, one could be wrong, and language has its limitations, does it not ? I'm not sure what you are talking about -- and in particular, the hotel allegory is obscure. But Homer would have agreed with Joanna. The lives of the gods (immortals) are meaningless, because it is their mortality that gives meaning to human lives. We are our histories, after all, and eternity dissolves history. And then there is the story of the Sybil. Carrol * As much as I'm enjoying THE ILIAD right now, I'd have to part company with Homer on this issue. To me, it seems that death is meaningless and that life and how we live it is the place where meaning is located. The length of our lives has no meaning in itself. As for the how: to lead a meaningful life, one would be bringing love, solidarity, and continually pushing the borders of the realm of necessity into the netherworld, while discovering, engaging, creating and expanding the realm of freedom. For the works! Mike B) = * Cognitive dissonance is the inner conflict produced when long-standing beliefs are contradicted by new evidence. http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
Re: Critical support to King George?
--- Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: (In John Oakes's highly informative The Ruling Race: a history of American Slaveholders, I just discovered that the Crown Governor General of Virginia offered freedom to any slave or indentured servant willing to fight for the counter-revolution. But wait, isn't emancipation supposed to be a goal of a bourgeois democratic revolution? Hard to keep track of these things.) The Brits also offered to free slaves who fought with them in the War of 1812. There is a line in full version of the Star Spangled Banner referring to the hireling and the slave, that is, the Hessian mercenaries and the Brit-emancipated blacks, as enemies of the Americans. jks __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
Re: Critical support to King George?
andie nachgeborenen wrote: The Brits also offered to free slaves who fought with them in the War of 1812. There is a line in full version of the Star Spangled Banner referring to the hireling and the slave, that is, the Hessian mercenaries and the Brit-emancipated blacks, as enemies of the Americans. I believe the tactic of freeing slaves of the enemy has been around as long as there have been slaves and warfare. It never had anything to do with ideology. Carrol jks
Re: frontiers of one-upmanship
On Sat, 23 Aug 2003 andie nachgeborenen wrote: Yeah, I thought this was great. We put in in power, then when they get caught, we take what they stole. Don't the Nicaraguans deserve the proceeds of Aleman's robberies? To be fair, according to the article, that's who will get them: In cases likes Nicaragua, officials said they planned to return any money seized to the country from which they believe it was taken. Michael
how to take over universities
Microsoft's Big Role on Campus Donations Fund Research, Build Long-Term Connections By Ariana Eunjung Cha Washington Post Staff Writer Monday, August 25, 2003; Page A01 REDMOND, Wash. -- Bearing gifts of cash, software and computers worth $25 million, Microsoft Corp. came to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1999, saying it wanted to jointly develop educational technologies. Some scholars expressed more suspicion than gratitude. At a celebration to kick off the collaboration, students and faculty members heckled the speakers, insisting the computer company's software wasn't worthy of use or study at MIT. Some took boxes of Microsoft's Office 2000 software and stomped on them. An editorial in the school newspaper wondered: Had the school sold itself out to become the Microsoft Institute of Technology? Today, four years into the five-year partnership, the protests are over and Microsoft technology is firmly entrenched at MIT. Aeronautical design classes now use Microsoft's Flight Simulator computer program. Electrical engineering and computer science professors are putting their courses online using Microsoft's PowerPoint presentation software. The university's educational computer network is being overhauled to use Microsoft's .Net architecture. Video games, hardly an MIT priority but a strong commercial interest of Microsoft's, have suddenly become a subject of scholarly inquiry. Similar transformations are taking place at university campuses across the nation, escalating the debate over corporate influence on academia. Such concerns about donations have been raised in fields of study as diverse as auto engineering and medicine, but Microsoft's donations are a special case. Because students are likely to keep using the technology after graduation, they help to maintain Microsoft's software industry dominance. Universities have become much more open to corporate donations even when they have strings attached, and they are less likely today to assess the long-term impact of these donations on academic freedom, said Lawrence C. Soley, a professor at Marquette University and author of Leasing the Ivory Tower: The Corporate Takeover of Academia. Donations to 1,000 Schools Microsoft has lavished $500 million over the past five years on research and teaching projects at 1,000 schools, funding efforts by 6,000 academics in computer science, electrical engineering, linguistics, biology, mathematics, graphic arts, music and other fields. Microsoft partners are among computer science's biggest luminaries: A. Richard Newton, dean of the engineering school at the University of California at Berkeley; Eugene H. Spafford, who runs Purdue University's influential cybersecurity institute; and Gail E. Kaiser, a Columbia University researcher who is one of the nation's most prominent software engineering experts and one of the few tenured female professors in the field. The software giant's donations have allowed universities to follow through on projects they could not have otherwise dreamed of, given their limited research budgets. The collaborations have not only led to new products on store shelves but work dominating academic journals focused on high-tech innovation. The corporation, however, has also directly or indirectly influenced curriculums and research priorities, drawing an outcry from critics who say the donations are turning computer science departments into vocational schools where mastery of proprietary computer programs are valued over the study of theory. Hal Abelson, a computer science professor who co-directs the MIT-Microsoft partnership, said the donations have allowed MIT to make class readings and other material freely available on the Web, benefiting not only the school community but the world at large. That is not distorting the research agenda, but doing things we otherwise might not have, he said. Microsoft, for its part, acknowledges that its donations are about business development as well as philanthropy, but that it is a win-win situation for everyone. The success of the field comes from innovations through university environment, said Rick Rashid, Microsoft's senior vice president for research. Microsoft prospers when universities prosper. Still, others lament that even if everyone has the best of intentions, the end result portends a future when innovation in the field of computers will be greatly influenced, if not controlled, by a single company. [I worry] that in the face of budget shortfalls, universities will sacrifice their research autonomy, offering up curriculum and academic integrity to the highest bidder, said Mark Schaan, a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University who was part of a group of students at the University of Waterloo, the Canadian equivalent of MIT, who last year urged administrators to turn down Microsoft's donations. Project 42 Sets the Tone Microsoft first began to reach out to universities in a serious way in the mid-1990s with
Re: Critical support to King George?
--- Carrol Cox [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: andie nachgeborenen wrote: The Brits also offered to free slaves who fought with them in the War of 1812. There is a line in full version of the Star Spangled Banner referring to the hireling and the slave, that is, the Hessian mercenaries and the Brit-emancipated blacks, as enemies of the Americans. I believe the tactic of freeing slaves of the enemy has been around as long as there have been slaves and warfare. It never had anything to do with ideology. Carrol jks * That refers to Lincoln too? Mike B) = * Cognitive dissonance is the inner conflict produced when long-standing beliefs are contradicted by new evidence. http://profiles.yahoo.com/swillsqueal __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
Re: Critical support to King George?
When the people rise in masses in behalf of the Union and the liberties of their country, truly may it be said, 'The gates of hell shall not prevail against them.' --Abraham Lincoln, from the February 11, 1861 Reply to Governor Morton
Re: Critical support to King George? (from PEN-L)
I believe the tactic of freeing slaves of the enemy has been around as long as there have been slaves and warfare. It never had anything to do with ideology. Carrol That refers to Lincoln too? Mike B) Historian James McPherson has a book on Antietam that argues that the Emancipation Proclamation was announced after Union losses forced Lincoln to adopt a make-or-break effort that involved big political risks. McPherson is an interesting figure. He represents that wing of American scholarship that puts the most revolutionary spin on the Northern leadership, despite the evidence here of Lincoln's waffling. This has endeared him to the WSWS website, a Healyite sectarian outfit that does have excellent analysis of movies and other topics that are not compromised by their dogmatism. You can read interviews with him at: http://www.wsws.org/sections/category/history/h-mcpher.shtml Here's a quote from Salon.com review of his Antietam book: What made Antietam different from other engagements, according to McPherson, was that it decided the fate of the country in at least two lasting respects. Prior to the battle, Lincoln performed an excruciating tightrope act, suspended between a northern political mosaic that exerted crosscutting pressures from various quarters for and against emancipation as a Union war policy and a need to keep border slave states and Northern Democrats in his war coalition. Lincoln himself stated: If slavery is not wrong, nothing is wrong, but he knew the limits of both his constitutional power and his political base too well to jeopardize the war effort by being aggressive on freeing the slaves. Five days after Antietam, the Emancipation Proclamation was issued. He had tried half-measures before then, however; as Union generals, without Lincoln's official approval, began to confiscate slaves as war contraband, Lincoln would urge the border-state representatives to accept government compensation -- literally, payment for their former property - in return for a gradual emancipation of their slaves. It didn't work -- but Lincoln's efforts prompted some great rhetoric from the master orator [Gradual emancipation] would come gently as the dews of heaven, not rending or wrecking anything. Will you not embrace it? You can not, if you would, be blind to the signs of the times. full: http://www.salon.com/books/review/2002/09/17/mcpherson/index1.html -- The Marxism list: www.marxmail.org
Re: frontiers of one-upmanship
That's good, at least. jks --- Michael Pollak [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: On Sat, 23 Aug 2003 andie nachgeborenen wrote: Yeah, I thought this was great. We put in in power, then when they get caught, we take what they stole. Don't the Nicaraguans deserve the proceeds of Aleman's robberies? To be fair, according to the article, that's who will get them: In cases likes Nicaragua, officials said they planned to return any money seized to the country from which they believe it was taken. Michael __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
Re: American History and Slavery-1
The African American as a people and the Black Belt of the South - as a colonial nation, are not the same thing, but rather distinct but interconnected historically evolved entities. The American nation was basically Southern at its inception. Its core area was Maryland, Delaware, Virginia, North and South Carolina and Georgia. This is of course the historical reason why the South controlled the country in the first place. America was Southern. The New England states would develop later as shipping and manufacturing appendages of the slave plantation system. By the late 1840s, the political leaders of the South understood that the North was experiencing massive population growth and industrial expansion. They understood that this shift from manufacture to industry was creating a new Nation in the North, being formed on the basis of European immigration. The South began preparations for the irrepressible conflict. Nations are not built or based on color, but evolve as the historical _expression_ of a community of people, culture, economics and land. The evolving culture of the African American had already made the South Southern, as it existed and evolved in harmony and conflict with the emerging nation in the North. Being Southern was always clearly distinct from the evolving nation in the North. One national formation was evolving on the basis of the economic of slavery and the newly arising nation in the North was evolving on the basis of the transition from manufacture to industry and European immigration. Slavery and the Economic impulse leading to the Civil War Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote exhaustively on the economic formation called the plantation system, the form of manual labor represented by the slave, why this was a value producing system, the political motion leading to the Civil War and how New World slavery was the powerful pistons in the engine of transformation from landed property relations - feudalism in the economic essence, to the industrial value producing system founded on the basis of bourgeois property. The difference between patriarchal slavery - labor as primarily the production of use-values or for direct personal consumption, and slavery as it existed and operated on the basis of the bourgeois property relations, is in the long run the reason why the slaves in the deep South became the pivot of development towards nationhood and a national movement. Plantation slavery became a value producing system with all its social consequences and not an economic structure where use-value production predominated. Not only does Marx call the planter class "bourgeois," but also the property relations of this value producing system is a reproduction of money/capital pure and simple. The form of an economic system should not be confused with its essence - the form of energy expended and how the product of labor is distributed, and it is true that slavery in the American South resembled feudal social structures in the sense that the slave occupied a social position whose appearance resembled the most down trodden serf. Throughout history labor appears in various form with an underlying motive power - energy grid, which distinguish and define junctures in the development of the productive forces. These general forms: manual, mechanical (or industrial), and electronic are the foundation of the "forms" of history as it passes from one stage of the development of the productive forces to the next. How the products of labor are distributed is a good - fundamental, indicator of the property relations. The property relations cannot be delineated on the basis of the form of labor, but rather on how it is distributed or exchanged. The form, in which labor appeared - slavery or free labor, and its motive power - manual labor, steam driven manufacture, petroleum based industrial production has to be ascertained. Without this conception the contradiction internal to any social relations of production and why the contradiction is replaced by antagonism cannot be posed, much less understood. That is to say, in its economic essence and logic, plantation slavery in America was a value producing system - a bourgeois property relation. A value producing system means the products of labor assumed a commodity form. The products of slave labor - tobacco, sugar and cotton, were distributed or produced exclusively for their exchange-value and underwent conversion into money/capital in the world market of that time. Plantation slavery was not a form of economic feudalism or the historical period of time called the primitive accumulation of capital. In Capital Marx makes clear what is meant by the primitive accumulation of capital. He also makes clear the passing of patriarchal slavery into latifundia or slavery on the basis of bourgeois property. The slave form of the labor is why capitalist slavery is untenable. Marx gives the most detailed and exacting description of the fundamental
political ecology
Ecologists fear disaster as oil rush takes grip in quake zone Russian island to be turned into Japan's energy hub in project worth billions to Shell Nick Paton Walsh in Nogliki, Sakhalin Monday August 25, 2003 The Guardian It will be the largest energy project in the world, but ecologists fear that a huge pipeline and three drilling platforms on and around the Russian island of Sakhalin, which borders Japan, may spell environmental disaster. The project is likely to bring a company led by British and Dutch giant Shell hundreds of billions of dollars and the Kremlin $49bn (£31bn). Moscow's politicians and oil executives are already counting down to the project's completion in 2007. But ecologists are criticising the foolish decision to build the pipeline underground through an active seismic fault in an area considered by many a rare marine reserve. US ecologists Pacific Environment say the platforms, one of which is already working a few miles offshore from the crumbling northern town of Nogliki, have upset fish and whale breeding, and could spell extinction for the West Pacific grey whale. Ecologists also claim local laws have been changed so that the project owners, Sakhalin Energy International Consortium, the company registered in Bermuda by Shell and their Japanese partners for the scheme, can more easily drill for oil - and also dump building waste from constructing a new tanker port - in previously protected areas off the island's shore. The company deny any such changes were made, saying the areas were never classified as protected in the first place. The campaign group Sakhalin Ecological Watch also fears the pipeline will not withstand the serious earthquakes that regularly hit Sakhalin. It is worried that leaks will destroy river and forest wildlife, and the 1,103 crossings the pipeline makes across the island's river and stream network will radically affect salmon breeding grounds. Sakhalin Energy accepts the sensors on the pipeline can only measure the loss of 1% of the pipeline's total output, meaning that up to 1,800 barrels of oil a day could leak without being noticed. But it adds that the pipeline was designed to withstand most tremors, often goes under the rivers, and other sensors would see the changes caused in and around the pipeline by such a leak. We are in business to make money, said a spokesman, and a 1,800-barrel-a-day leak would be a big loss. We would notice it. Sakhalin Energy's decision to invest $10bn in the project marked the single biggest foreign investment in Russian history, and was hailed as a sign that foreign companies had lost their fear of the so-called Red Mafia's grip on business, and that they finally felt comfortable putting money into Vladimir Putin's Russia. While the Kremlin insists the money will bring jobs to poverty-stricken Sakhalin, many think the 6% royalty paid by Sakhalin Energy to Moscow on all revenues also influenced Moscow's decision. Sakhalin Energy is not alone: US giant Exxon is already drilling offshore, and BP is exploring the coastline for reserves. Foreign investment in the island may eventually exceed $30bn. The projects have thrived on the support of the local administration and Moscow, and will effectively turn Sakhalin into the energy hub for Japan - if not the entire region - over the next decade. But tragedy struck yesterday when the death of the island's governor, Igor Farkhutdinov, was announced, after the remains of his crashed helicopter were found on the neighbouring island of Kamchatka. Elections will follow, perhaps focusing public opinion on the governor's pet project. In Nogliki, the remote northern settlement nearest to Sakhalin Energy's planned second drilling platform, public opinion is hardening over how they have yet to reap real benefits from the multi-billion dollar energy complex springing up around them. While Sakhalin Energy is building an airport and improving some roads in Nogliki, locals say their movements have been restricted. The local fishermen are particularly angry. Most are from a local tribe known as the Nivkhi, a third of the remaining 3,000 of whom are in Nogliki. They say they have been banned from their lifeblood - fishing - because the local government does not want the platform disturbed by fishing boats. The diet of the Nivkhi depends upon fish, without which, they say, they fall ill and their teeth rot. The Nivkhi plan a protest today during which they say they will fish without permission. Pacific Environment claims the fishing ban constitutes a form of government-sanctioned discrimination against the Nivkhi, a breach of the universal declaration of human rights. When the oil and gas has been extracted and briefly purified at a nearby plant, it will travel 500 miles south in a pipeline to the southern bay of Korsakov. Bulldozers are already ripping up the picturesque beaches of the bay, and have permission to start building a port from September 5, from where tankers will ship
US Ambassador Schneider on data privacy
The most important technological development of the late 20th century is arguably the advance in Information Technology. The world is increasingly information-rich and information dependent. The unfettered ability to tap into those flows of information already is critical to many businesses and organizations. In the near future, that information dependency will be universal. Electronic Commerce appears to be a key component of our common destiny. This is why my government is deeply concerned about the issue of data privacy. - Remarks by Ambassador Cynthia P. Schneider at The Hague and Amsterdam American Business Clubs, as prepared The Hague, Holiday Inn Crown Plaza, January 26, 2000 Source: http://www.usemb.nl/012600.htm
Re: Critical support to King George?
I doubt that in the real world there's ever a one-to-one correspondence between class interests -- including the goals of the bourgeois democratic revolution -- and the interests of any given individual in power or struggling for power. Because of the relative autonomy of the state and ideology, real-world politics in effect reflects the pluralistic competition of a wide variety of interest groups each of which is pushing complex goals (class goals, those of patriarchy, those of racial supremacy, personal advancement, religion, etc.) Thus, royalist forces might free slaves (which might be seen as going against their royalist goals) if it turns out to serve tactical or strategic advantage. In another kind of case, Lincoln freed the slaves -- in areas he didn't actually control -- as a strategic maneuver, but one that fit with the growing power of the abolitionists and the punish-the-South crowd (the later radical Republicans). It's likely that he wouldn't have freed the slaves if the political forces against it had been really strong. Again, the Emancipation Proclamation -- and the specificities of its implementation -- represent the combination of different political forces. Of course, the theory of political pluralism is woefully incomplete. The competition takes place within the context of what Althusserians call the social formation (a bunch of different and interacting societal modes of production). With the growing domination of industrial capitalism (based on the proletarianization of the direct producers), the balance of political power was shifting away from merchant capital (which often profited directly from slavery) to industrial capitalists (who didn't). Even so, the story of the US Civil War was more than some simple struggle within the ruling classes. Old-fashioned Marxist histories (such as Hacker's TRIUMPH OF AMERICAN CAPITALISM, even though he repudiates Marxism in the preface) didn't apply a theory where there's a rising class that as a unified force embraces the goals of the bourgeois democratic revolution and then these goals were imposed -- as if capitalist history were a conscious product of the capitalist class. Rather, the various conflicts that produced the Civil War and similar events had the unplanned -- and often unwanted -- objective effect of promoting the development of industrial capitalism. And this was not a predetermined process: it's possible the South could have won (though, economically, it would have lost in the long run, IMHO). The only case in Marx where there's a class that consciously embraces its class interest and remakes the world in its image is the proletarian revolution, where the class-in-itself becomes a class-for-itself. Of course, this hasn't happened in practice yet. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: andie nachgeborenen [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, August 24, 2003 7:15 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Critical support to King George? --- Louis Proyect [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: (In John Oakes's highly informative The Ruling Race: a history of American Slaveholders, I just discovered that the Crown Governor General of Virginia offered freedom to any slave or indentured servant willing to fight for the counter-revolution. But wait, isn't emancipation supposed to be a goal of a bourgeois democratic revolution? Hard to keep track of these things.) The Brits also offered to free slaves who fought with them in the War of 1812. There is a line in full version of the Star Spangled Banner referring to the hireling and the slave, that is, the Hessian mercenaries and the Brit-emancipated blacks, as enemies of the Americans. jks __ Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com
Re: Getting there (was: Critical support to King George?)
The only case in Marx where there's a class that consciously embraces its class interest and remakes the world in its image is the proletarian revolution, where the class-in-itself becomes a class-for-itself. Of course, this hasn't happened in practice yet. In Marx's own time, the working class comprised perhaps two-fifths of the population, and had a clear cultural and historical identity. But, in the developed capitalist countries, the working class now comprises four-fifths of the population, and no longer has the same clear cultural and historical identity, not withstanding sentimental rhetoric. Of course, you can talk about the working class as an objective social-structural fact (all those people socio-economically forced to work for a living, lacking other assets or means of life, plus direct dependents on their personal income, that would make working as such a voluntary choice). But the point is, that this is not a meaningful common factor which can inspire political unity, except in special conjunctures, and even in those conjunctures, a mode of political organisation is assumed which can assert that common factor. Already in the Poverty of Philosophy, Marx remarks that really a social class which isn't aware of its common interests is not really a class at all, but just a mass. Faced with this fact, what is it that Marxists actually do ? They tend to do four things: they seek to elaborate a socio-political tradition anyhow, and propagate this; they seek to analyse the social and economic structure; they seek to build political organisations based on Marxist ideology; they seek to intervene in cultural themes and political issues from a Marxist perspective, in a battle for ideological hegemony. But this isn't a very adequate strategy, which leads to very little result. Why ? Because the real problem is different, and for that you have to step out of conservative 19th century models of Marxist politics, and Marxist language, and clear the way for some fresh thought. What would Lenin say if he was alive today ? He would say, the real problem is different, it is, how can you mobilise a very large mass of people for the purpose of instating a governmental power that can begin the transition to socialism ? If you just forget about rhetoric, and put the question this way, three prerequisites are rather obvious: for that mobilisation to occur, (1) you need to know what would actually appeal to and consciously unite that large mass, as they really are, (2) you need to have a clear understanding of where you want to take that mass to, exactly; (3) you need to devise an overall strategy and organisational forms, which take that mass from where they are now, to your goal. It may sound a very simplistic rule of thumb, but the overwhelming bulk of radical thinking is not systematically oriented to these questions, and that is the main reason why socialist movements fail, although of course we can invent millions of reasons for failure. Indeed if you deconstruct what they are actually doing, you find that they focus mainly on strategies of failure and apologies and moralisms, rather than going systematically, step by step, through the requirements, on the basis of the most advanced knowledge we have for the purpose of solving these problems, in order to devise strategies for success. Therefore you can talk and write till you are blue in the face, you can fancy yourself very radical, and it may indeed generate some personal satisfaction or revenue for some, but you don't get anywhere much with your radicalism. All you get is jibes to the effect that if you know all this, why aren't you successful ?. If we now consider the international working class statistically or culturally, we can easily conclude that, whatever be the process of cultural homogenisation resulting from the internationalisation of capital, and whatever be the social-structural similarities of the positions of workers, a worker in China lives in a completely different world from a German worker, and from the point of view of a Chinese worker, the German worker might well be perceived as a member of the bourgeoisie, given the cultural and economic gap involved. On the other side, if you compare, say, American capitalism with Indian capitalism, you realise that capitalism functions in a completely different way in these countries. You can talk about capitalism and the fact that both countries are capitalist, but it does not mean very much because in reality the real experience of living in these countries is worlds apart. Now, we can of course go on talking about globalisation in a fragmented, eclectic sort of way, but this misses the real problems by a mile. Paolo Giussiani wrote an article once on the globalisation of hot air and that title just about sums it up. In a world of the internet, mass media and mobile phone communication, communications become highly reflexive, and the utilisation of conscious awareness changes, the
moms doing the press' job
Title: moms doing the press' job Four 9/11 Moms Battle Bush by Gail Sheehy In mid-June, F.B.I. director Robert Mueller III and several senior agents in the bureau received a group of about 20 visitors in a briefing room of the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington, D.C. The director himself narrated a PowerPoint presentation that summarized the numbers of agents and leads and evidence he and his people had collected in the 18-month course of their ongoing investigation of Penttbom, the clever neologism the bureau had invented to reduce the sites of devastation on 9/11 to one word: Pent for Pentagon, Pen for Pennsylvania, tt for the Twin Towers and bom for the four planes that the government had been forewarned could be used as weapons-even bombs-but chose to ignore. After the formal meeting, senior agents in the room faced a grilling by Kristen Breitweiser, a 9/11 widow whose cohorts are three other widowed moms from New Jersey. I don't understand, with all the warnings about the possibilities of Al Qaeda using planes as weapons, and the Phoenix Memo from one of your own agents warning that Osama bin Laden was sending operatives to this country for flight-school training, why didn't you check out flight schools before Sept. 11? Do you know how many flight schools there are in the U.S.? Thousands, a senior agent protested. We couldn't have investigated them all and found these few guys. Wait, you just told me there were too many flight schools and that prohibited you from investigating them before 9/11, Kristen persisted. How is it that a few hours after the attacks, the nation is brought to its knees, and miraculously F.B.I. agents showed up at Embry-Riddle flight school in Florida where some of the terrorists trained? We got lucky, was the reply. Kristen then asked the agent how the F.B.I. had known exactly which A.T.M. in Portland, Me., would yield a videotape of Mohammed Atta, the leader of the attacks. The agent got some facts confused, then changed his story. When Kristen wouldn't be pacified by evasive answers, the senior agent parried, What are you getting at? I think you had open investigations before Sept. 11 on some of the people responsible for the terrorist attacks, she said. We did not, the agent said unequivocally. A month later, on the morning of July 24, before the scathing Congressional report on intelligence failures was released, Kristen and the three other moms from New Jersey with whom she'd been in league sat impassively at a briefing by staff director Eleanor Hill: In fact, they learned, the F.B.I. had open investigations on 14 individuals who had contact with the hijackers while they were in the United States. The flush of pride in their own research passed quickly. This was just another confirmation that the federal government continued to obscure the facts about its handling of suspected terrorists leading up to the Sept. 11 attacks. So afraid is the Bush administration of what could be revealed by inquiries into its failures to protect Americans from terrorist attack, it is unabashedly using Kremlin tactics to muzzle members of Congress and thwart the current federal commission investigating the failures of Sept. 11. But there is at least one force that the administration cannot scare off or shut up. They call themselves Just Four Moms from New Jersey, or simply the girls. Kristen and the three other housewives who also lost their husbands in the attack on the World Trade Center started out knowing virtually nothing about how their government worked. For the last 20 months they have clipped and Googled, rallied and lobbied, charmed and intimidated top officials all the way to the White House. In the process, they have made themselves arguably the most effective force in dancing around the obstacle course by which the administration continues to block a transparent investigation of what went wrong with the country's defenses on Sept. 11 and what we should be doing about it. They have no political clout, no money, no powerful husbands-no husbands at all since Sept. 11-and they are up against a White House, an Attorney General, a Defense Secretary, a National Security Advisor and an F.B.I. director who have worked out an ingenious bait-and-switch game to thwart their efforts and those of any investigative body. The Mom Cell The four moms-Kristen Breitweiser, Patty Casazza, Mindy Kleinberg and Lorie van Auken-use tactics more like those of a leaderless cell. They have learned how to deposit their assorted seven children with select grandmothers before dawn and rocket down the Garden State Parkway to Washington. They have become experts at changing out of pedal-pushers and into proper pantsuits while their S.U.V. is stopped in traffic, so they can hit the Capitol rotunda running. They have talked strategy with Senator John McCain and Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. They once caught Congressman Porter Goss hiding behind his office door to avoid them. And they
RES: [PEN-L] RES: [PEN-L] RES: [PEN-L] God: a socialist view
Atheism, marxism-leninism, trotskyism and most forms of marxism are other forms of religion. Little marxism and few marxists were scientific as Marx intended. Renato Pompeu -Mensagem original- De: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] nome de Jurriaan Bendien Enviada em: domingo, 24 de agosto de 2003 23:32 Para: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Assunto: Re: [PEN-L] RES: [PEN-L] RES: [PEN-L] God: a socialist view Well I agree, but the Marxist-Leninist and Trotskyist interpretation of Marx has a heavy atheist bias,A --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.512 / Virus Database: 309 - Release Date: 19/08/03
Re: RES: [PEN-L] RES: [PEN-L] RES: [PEN-L] God: a socialist view
Renato Pompeu wrote: Atheism, marxism-leninism, trotskyism and most forms of marxism are other forms of religion. Little marxism and few marxists were scientific as Marx intended. Renato Pompeu There was a discussion Pen-L a year or two ago on what Marx Engels (or mid-19th c. writers in general) _meant_ by the word science. Probably the word had much less rigid denotation than it does now. Perhaps it meant only systematic with some reasonable attempt not to confuse descriptions (or naming) with explanations.
Re: RES: [PEN-L] RES: [PEN-L] RES: [PEN-L] God: a socialist view
any theory (including Marxism) can become a religion if people take it too seriously. But no theory _has_ to become a religion, as long as people recognize the fact that theory and empirical reality almost never correspond exactly. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: Renato Pompeu [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, August 25, 2003 3:53 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L] RES: [PEN-L] RES: [PEN-L] RES: [PEN-L] God: a socialist view Atheism, marxism-leninism, trotskyism and most forms of marxism are other forms of religion. Little marxism and few marxists were scientific as Marx intended. Renato Pompeu -Mensagem original- De: PEN-L list [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] nome de Jurriaan Bendien Enviada em: domingo, 24 de agosto de 2003 23:32 Para: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Assunto: Re: [PEN-L] RES: [PEN-L] RES: [PEN-L] God: a socialist view Well I agree, but the Marxist-Leninist and Trotskyist interpretation of Marx has a heavy atheist bias,A --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.512 / Virus Database: 309 - Release Date: 19/08/03
Palast on Times
BLACK-OUT AT THE TIMES Readers Forced to View Unsolicited Corpornography by Greg Palast Monday, August 25, 2003 I guess the lights never went back on at the Times. That's the only acceptable explanation for the loving Lewinsky The Paper of Record gave to the power industry on the front page of its Sunday edition. Over 20-some column inches, we are told that experts say that the reason the lights went out over one fourth our continent ten days ago was that the electric industry, most particularly, transmission lines, remained regulated. The answer to our woes, the Times informs us, is more deregulation -- except for the visionary rules contained in the President's energy bill. In the editorial posing as a news story, the Times lectures us that the president's proposals would have been law, and saved us from the power outage, but politics have stymied their progress. Later in the article, the stymiers of progress are named: those evil small-minded consumer groups. So who are these experts who revealed The Truth to the Times? The authors quote seven in the article, beginning with David Owen, the industry's chief lobbyist. That paid shill is followed by James Hoecker, identified by his former title only, as a independent regulator. Just from the article, you'd think the poor guy is unemployed these days. In fact, he's walked comfortably through the revolving door and onto the industry payroll. His law firm represents, among others, First Energy, the characters who started the black-out rolling. I guess that fact was not fit to print in The Times. My favorite is the Times giving us the expert advice of the director of Transmission for the National Grid Transco which owns and runs the grid in England and Wales. This Brit says Americans should pay more money to grid operators. What he doesn't say -- and the Times is happy to keep his secret -- is that his corporation owns Niagara-Mohawk Power Corporation, the company that spread the power outage into New York. Undoubtedly, NiMo's failure to react to the emergency resulted from the corporation's eliminating 800 workers in New York over the past two years and radically cutting investment in the grid system it operates in the USA. The parade of industry retainers, payrollers and lobbyists lecturing us stumbles on through the Times' inside pages. Unnamed industry analysts telling us consumers will have to foot the bill to fix the system. As an analyst of the industry for decades -- and on no one's payroll except the United Nations -- I can tell you that you HAVE paid the bill already for a good system. But power pirates such as the National Grid of England have run off with the booty. I admit, there's one expert cited who is not receiving an industry paycheck. The article is capped by the finger-wagging counsel of the Chairman of the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission. Chairman Pat Wood III concludes the article with his admonition that deregulation must be accelerated. Wood is, after all, the man in charge of our nation's power system. His qualifications for the job? His appointment was secretly proposed by Ken Lay. If the Times wants to publish corpornography on its front page, hey, it's a free country. At least they did it with the lights off. To receive more of Greg's investigative reports on the energy crisis and other corporate shenanigans click here: http://www.gregpalast.com/contact.cfm Greg Palast is author of the bestseller, The Best Democracy Money Can Buy, and the worstseller, Democracy and Regulation. The later, regarding the dangers of deregulation, written with Theo MacGregor and Jerrold Oppenheim, was financed and published by the United Nations ILO. Media enquiries: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
FDI versus investment in foreign securities by the USA
In a previous post, I mentioned that FDI is by no means representative of total foreign investment since it only measures actual ownership of assets (companies etc.) in foreign countries. I just came across some data on the foreign investment by the USA in securities, check it out for yourself: http://www.ustreas.gov/tic/preshc01.pdf
insider selling redux
http://www.latimes.com/business Indicators Flash Red, but Should Investors Stop? Insider selling, bullish sentiment and low volatility foretell a stock market drop. But some doubt the gauges' value. By Josh Friedman Times Staff Writer August 25, 2003 The stock market has rallied briskly since early August, lifting key indexes to their highest levels in more than a year. But as Wall Street heads into September - historically the weakest month of the year for stocks - some analysts are troubled by long-reliable market indicators that are flashing red. One gauge of investors' attitude, the VIX index of options-market volatility, is pointing to extreme complacency. When it has sunk to these levels in the past it often has foreshadowed sharp declines in share prices. Likewise, the heavily bullish tone in surveys of market newsletter editors and individual investors is a classic warning sign that stocks are near a peak. So are high levels of company insider stock sales while insider buying remains low. To some analysts, these indicators suggest that the rally that has lifted the Standard Poor's 500 index 24% since March 11 is topping out. And yet the market has held up this summer in the face of soaring bond yields, and got a new head of steam in the last two weeks even though it's well known to investors that September often brings a pullback in prices. Some say all of this is encouraging, not scary. It's acting like a bull market. It gets overbought and yet it doesn't want to go down, said Steve Todd, editor of Todd Market Forecast newsletter in Mission Viejo, who noted that stocks rose last week despite terrorist bombings in the Middle East and weak earnings from Hewlett-Packard Co. Imagine trying to push a beach ball underwater, Todd said. That's what we have. By contrast, in a bear market it's a bowling ball, he said. Some bullish analysts say market indicators such as the VIX may have lost their predictive power because too many people are counting on them to show the way. Others say economic hopes now trump all: If you think the economy, and corporate earnings, will accelerate in 2004, selling stocks at this point would be a mistake, they say. But bears say that ignoring the classic warning signs of a market top is simply foolhardy. Here is what the numbers are showing and how market pros view them: . The VIX index. The VIX, which tracks investors' use of put and call option contracts on the blue-chip SP 100 stock index to gauge expectations of market moves, is considered dangerously low when it falls to about 20 or below. It closed at 20.27 Friday after hitting a three-year low of 19.23 on Tuesday. Wall Street regards the VIX as a contrary indicator: When it is low it's a sign that many investors already are in the market, aren't hedging their bets and are optimistic stocks will keep rising, all of which implies there are few people left on the sidelines to fuel a new rally. In August 2000, for instance, the VIX bottomed at 18.23 - just as the average New York Stock Exchange stock reached its bull-market peak. Over the next four months the SP 500 sank 17%. By contrast, the VIX reached extraordinary highs last fall, just as the bear market bottomed. But some say the VIX may have lost its predictive punch, at least temporarily. In the past, the VIX has been very effective in showing complacency, and that has usually coincided with market tops, said Joe Sunderman, director of trading at Schaeffer's Investment Research in Cincinnati. What's different this time is how much attention it's getting in the press. He likened the VIX to the so-called January effect for smaller stocks. In the 1980s Wall Street analysts widely touted the tendency of smaller stocks to outperform the rest of the market each January. Since then, however, what might once have been January gains for smaller stocks often have occurred in October, November or December as investors have tried to get a jump on the phenomenon. Once people get burned by the VIX and say they're going to toss it out of their playbook, then it might work again in the future, Sunderman said. Other analysts say the VIX has long been inconsistent. Todd noted that VIX readings under 20 in early 1995 and 1998, for example, preceded strong market rallies. This year, the VIX fell to about 21 in mid-May, but if you stayed away from the market because of that, you missed a 700-point gain in the Dow, Todd said. The Dow Jones industrial average, which closed Friday at 9,348.87, was around 8,600 in mid-May. In a bull market the VIX will go down and stay awhile, Todd said. . Sentiment surveys. Bullishness has been high this summer in surveys by the American Assn. of Individual Investors and by Investors Intelligence, which polls market newsletter editors. In AAII's latest online survey last week, 63% of respondents were bullish on stocks, 18.5% were bearish and the rest were neutral. In last week's Investors Intelligence poll, 55.1% of market
Writing off the bourgeoisie
Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, V. 2: The Politics of Social Classes: Around the latter part of 1848 and early 1849, Marx gave up the expectation that the bourgeoisie might come through after all. This was not an easy conclusion to come to, since--in the absence of a crystal ball to foresee alternative roads--it suggested that in Germany the road of progressive economic modernization might be closed or long delayed. Marx did not adopt the conclusion on some given day; on the contrary, there are many signs of groping and oscillation, as might be expected of militants who were trying to understand an unexpected development, not in a library carrel a hundred years later but in the hurly-burly of revolutionary events. 1. WRITING OFF THE BOURGEOISIE Even as early as July 1848 there was already an element of ambiguity in the following passage in an article by Marx: The [Hansemann ministry] wants to establish the rule of the bourgeoisie while at the same time striking a compromise with the old police- and feudal state. In this two-sided and contradictory task, at every turn it sees the still-to-be-established rule of the bourgeoisie and its own existence frustrated by the reactionary forces of the absolutist, feudal type--and it will succumb to the latter. The bourgeoisie cannot fight it out for its own rule without temporarily taking the people as a whole as its ally, hence without coming out more or less democratically. There is the direct statement that it will succumb, but the next implication is that it will succumb unless . . . The second view, in fact, remained the operative line for months. A month before, in the eloquent article in which Marx defended the June uprising of the Paris workers, his bitterness toward the bourgeois executioners of the revolt did not prevent him from asking, toward the end of the article, whether this deep gulf that has opened before us should lead one to think that the fight for a democratic constitution makes no difference, that the difference between a democratic state form and the absolutist state form is only empty, illusory, nil. His answer is a vigorous no. The struggles arising out of social development have to be fought to their conclusion: The best form of the state is that in which social antagonisms are not blurred, are not forcibly--hence only artificially, only illusorily--fettered. The best form of the state is that in which they come to a free fight and thereby to a solution. Therefore the N.R.Z. group pushed for everything that would further a democratic-constitutional government, a complete democratiza-tion of the state. But increasingly a question mark had to be put over the issue: what social force could achieve this aim? The answer was not worked out by meditation in the offices of the N.R.Z. It came in response to a series of shocks. In September a watershed event cast a bright light. An uprising broke out in the Frankfurt area, fought by the workers of Frankfurt, Offenbach and Hanau, and by the peasants of the surrounding region, Engels reported. The bourgeois elements opposed the movement, and it was suppressed by the government with the help of Prussian, Austrian, and Hessian troops. Engels' article on the uprising looked at the class alignment and generalized: why the victories of the counterrevolution all over Europe? Because all sides know that the struggle that is looming in all civilized countries is an entirely different one, an infinitely more important one, than all previous revolutions: because in Vienna as in Paris, in Berlin as in Frankfurt, in London as in Milan, it is a question of the overthrow of the political rule of the bourgeoisie, of a transformation whose imminent consequences already fill all comfortable and puzzled citizens with dismay. Is there any revolutionary center in the world where the red flag, the battle symbol of the fraternizing European proletariat, has not waved over the barricades in the last five months? In Frankfurt too, the parliament of the united Junkers and bourgeois was combated under the red flag. It is because the bourgeoisie is threatened by every uprising breaking out now--threatened directly as to its political existence and indirectly as to its social existence: this is the reason for all these defeats. The mostly unarmed people have to fight not only against the forces of the organized bureaucratic and military state which have been taken over by the bourgeoisie, but also against the armed bourgeoisie itself. Confronting the unorganized and badly armed people stand the joint forces of the other classes of society, well organized and well equipped. And that is why the people have been beaten so far, and why they will continue to be beaten till their opponents are weakened--whether because the troops get involved in war or because they have an internal split--or until some big event drives the people into desperate struggle and demoralizes their opponents. Engels' article then points to
Re: Writing off the bourgeoisie
isn't this part of the theory of permanent revolution? Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: Louis Proyect [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, August 25, 2003 3:25 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [PEN-L] Writing off the bourgeoisie Hal Draper, Karl Marx's Theory of Revolution, V. 2: The Politics of Social Classes: Around the latter part of 1848 and early 1849, Marx gave up the expectation that the bourgeoisie might come through after all. This was not an easy conclusion to come to, since--in the absence of a crystal ball to foresee alternative roads--it suggested that in Germany the road of progressive economic modernization might be closed or long delayed. Marx did not adopt the conclusion on some given day; on the contrary, there are many signs of groping and oscillation, as might be expected of militants who were trying to understand an unexpected development, not in a library carrel a hundred years later but in the hurly-burly of revolutionary events. 1. WRITING OFF THE BOURGEOISIE Even as early as July 1848 there was already an element of ambiguity in the following passage in an article by Marx: The [Hansemann ministry] wants to establish the rule of the bourgeoisie while at the same time striking a compromise with the old police- and feudal state. In this two-sided and contradictory task, at every turn it sees the still-to-be-established rule of the bourgeoisie and its own existence frustrated by the reactionary forces of the absolutist, feudal type--and it will succumb to the latter. The bourgeoisie cannot fight it out for its own rule without temporarily taking the people as a whole as its ally, hence without coming out more or less democratically. There is the direct statement that it will succumb, but the next implication is that it will succumb unless . . . The second view, in fact, remained the operative line for months. A month before, in the eloquent article in which Marx defended the June uprising of the Paris workers, his bitterness toward the bourgeois executioners of the revolt did not prevent him from asking, toward the end of the article, whether this deep gulf that has opened before us should lead one to think that the fight for a democratic constitution makes no difference, that the difference between a democratic state form and the absolutist state form is only empty, illusory, nil. His answer is a vigorous no. The struggles arising out of social development have to be fought to their conclusion: The best form of the state is that in which social antagonisms are not blurred, are not forcibly--hence only artificially, only illusorily--fettered. The best form of the state is that in which they come to a free fight and thereby to a solution. Therefore the N.R.Z. group pushed for everything that would further a democratic-constitutional government, a complete democratiza-tion of the state. But increasingly a question mark had to be put over the issue: what social force could achieve this aim? The answer was not worked out by meditation in the offices of the N.R.Z. It came in response to a series of shocks. In September a watershed event cast a bright light. An uprising broke out in the Frankfurt area, fought by the workers of Frankfurt, Offenbach and Hanau, and by the peasants of the surrounding region, Engels reported. The bourgeois elements opposed the movement, and it was suppressed by the government with the help of Prussian, Austrian, and Hessian troops. Engels' article on the uprising looked at the class alignment and generalized: why the victories of the counterrevolution all over Europe? Because all sides know that the struggle that is looming in all civilized countries is an entirely different one, an infinitely more important one, than all previous revolutions: because in Vienna as in Paris, in Berlin as in Frankfurt, in London as in Milan, it is a question of the overthrow of the political rule of the bourgeoisie, of a transformation whose imminent consequences already fill all comfortable and puzzled citizens with dismay. Is there any revolutionary center in the world where the red flag, the battle symbol of the fraternizing European proletariat, has not waved over the barricades in the last five months? In Frankfurt too, the parliament of the united Junkers and bourgeois was combated under the red flag. It is because the bourgeoisie is threatened by every uprising breaking out now--threatened directly as to its political existence and indirectly as to its social existence: this is the reason for all these defeats. The mostly unarmed people have to fight not only against the forces of the organized bureaucratic and military state which have been taken over by the bourgeoisie, but also against
Re: Writing off the bourgeoisie
isn't this part of the theory of permanent revolution? Yes. Louis Proyect, Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org
