According to the Socialist Worker, The Green Party campaign of Ralph Nader
for president in 2000 was a lightning rod for grievances throughout U.S.
society - and helped to bring together activists from different movements
who had never worked together before. But while elections do matter,
By invoking Taft-Hartley against the longshore workers, Bush is effectively
declaring war on the working class here and the Iraqi people
simultaneously.
- Jack Heyman, business agent for ILWU Local 10, cited in Counterpunch
(2002).
I agree with Shane Mage on the Labor Management Relations
Could someone explain what Ralph Nader's candidacy has to do with the
development of a socialist party in the U.S.? I could swear he was a
petit bourgeois who believed in the beauties of small business and
competition.
This seems to be more a kind of supercilious political racism on your
(By professional revolutionaries Lenin did NOT mean fulltime
revolutionaries. He meant ordinary people who were working for a living
but in what time they had for politics they trained themselves as well
as possible.)
I think Carrol is basically correct, but:
(1) She does not distinguish
The fundamental cause of the present acute party crisis lies in the
extremely indecisive, vacillating and dilatory policy of the centre's
leading elements. Confronted with un-postponable organizational needs of the
party, they try to gain time and thereby provide a cover for the policy of
directly
Uh, that was a joke, unlike Jurriaan accusing me of political
racism, or some such, which I just let pass.
Here in Europe, we distinguish between passing wind and a joke. The New
Zealander Bill Rosenberg, a social democrat who sometimes has interesting
things to say, has sometimes posted
Jim C. wrote:
it is an honor to be marginalized and demonized by half-wits, sycophants
and idiots and if for some reason they did like me I would worry and lose
sleep what I am doing wrong - why I have not drawn the line of demarcation
clear enough.
With due respect, I don't look on it that way,
Justin wrote:
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
(Dutch Premier Balkende's visit to President Bush inspired me to write this
story).
In 1975, Dr Henry Kissinger, speaking about the CIA's policy towards Iraqi
Kurds, declared that covert action should not be confused with missionary
work. Ahem. Amidst more horrific, gruesome carnage, Al Jazeera
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.
It's not for me to say what Justin ought to do,
Disgusting. First they changed the name of my school for marketing
purposes and now they are completing the process of destruction of
radical tradition that the New School represented.
It's bad if American scholars have forgotten what democracy is, or what a
university is, for sure. But can they
Of course, if we don't see more street heat in the future, these changes
will likely not last.
Personally, I had the 'flu the last few days, felt terrible. Didn't make it
out the door tonight, and ended up discussing Biblical politics in the
Middle East with my flatmate Youssef. He reckons things
Aaron Gray-Block reports on the Expatica site:
Pakistan has pardoned atomic guru Dr Abdul Khan for trading nuclear secrets,
but Khan's Dutch business partner is under investigation in the Netherlands.
(...) International intelligence services have accused Henk Slebos - the
Dutch academic friend
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.
The grass always seems greener on the other side of the fence. What you
shouldn't overlook is that inequality and disparities have increased a lot
Professor Lord John Eatwell, one of the brightest British reformist
economists(http://www.jims.cam.ac.uk/people/faculty/eatwellj.html) wrote a
very simple but quite prophetic article at the beginning of the Clinton era,
which I've edited a little, with ten new subheads to fit with the current
Doug asked:
I'd like to hear someone argue to the contrary.
At the risk of appearing impossibly arrogant and irresponsible, I think it
is quite possible to unleash a revolution in the United States, you just
need to attack the weakest links in the chain there. All that is required is
to create a
Louis wrote:
B-52's raining Volkswagen size bombs on peasant villages recruited me to
socialism, not elegant descriptions of the benefits of a future world.
I do not see how the one need exclude the other, and it really avoids the
question of what would recruit young people to socialism these
Charles
asked:
How do you
avoid touching during sex ? Must be quite a trick.
This is a slightly
"schizo" answer maybe, but I would say, it could happen in a dream. John Lennon
explains this as follows in his track #9 Dream, as follows:
On a river of soundThru the
mirror go round,
This is a very good point. The appeal of autonomism is that you can call
yourself a revolutionary without actually forming organizations and taking
responsibility for anything. This was also the appeal of the New Left in
the 1960s.
But, with due respect, even there I think you are mistaken.
Since my time as Education student, I have frequently pondered the
phenomenon of sectarianism. Here's my thoughts, for the record:
1. ORIGINS
Sectarianism refers to mistaken and stunted attitudes to politics, real
social movements and human relations. The point of departure of sectarians
is
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
There are going
to be bosses. Leadership or being boss means you have accepted - one way
or
another, responsibility to do something.
Okay, so now there are going to be bosses. The question raised however is:
how do they become bosses, by what process ? How do they establish their
leadership ?
Peter,
Thanks for your comment, which is encouraging. I've never really had any
despair about political prospects or the lack of them. I don't care about
that, it's none of my concern. For most of the 1980s and some years in the
1990s I was involved in various groups and campaigns on and off. But
1) On the global level, the U.S. wields control
over the oil wells for some time to come and this would place it in a better
competitive position vis-à-vis partners in the Western World.
But is that really true ? My understanding is that
the US controls SOME of the oil resource but not ALL
Message-
From: Jurriaan Bendien [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2004 12:41:45 +0100
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] Will the oil run out ? Reflections from a layman
1) On the global level, the U.S. wields control over the oil wells for
some time to come and this would place
Personally, I often think that love is smoking your last cigarette, and
knowing that you'll never smoke again, because your are faced with something
fantastic (or have something fantastic in your face) which makes that you
don't want to smoke anymore.
My hunch is that human awareness is best
In the latest copy of Revu (p. 8), Henk Willem Smits mentions that KPMG,
Fortis and Philips are supporting the Bush campaign, contributing $400,000,
$119,000 and $34,000 respectively. KPMG said that the US branch had made an
autonomous decision. Likewise, Fortis said an independent decision was
February 12 2004 Cleavage Among the Voters? USA Today's poll on Jackson's
breast baring
We usually think that spotting an error in a professionally administered
poll takes some extra degree of training, or some knowledge of higher math.
But sometimes spotting a major problem in a poll published
Jim wrote:
so that the dominated groups can dominate.
Dominate what, or what sense ? (if you like word puzzles and poetry, in
Dutch, dominate = domineren, cryptologically containing the words dom
(=dumb), dominee (=church minister), nee (=no), ren (=run). neren
is also close to nieren
what sense does it make to proclaim revolutionary
socialism today?
The estimable Ernest Mandel once drafted an article on revolutionary
politics in a non-revolutionary situation (he never published it I think),
and indeed there was a real question there which needed to be answered.
How
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
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.
A new species of officer is achieving greatness in the Israel Defense
Forces. These people did most of their service as occupation officers, and
their excellence is a function of the degree of violence and brutality they
exercise against the Palestinians. The most striking example of this trend
is
Just to reply quickly to Louis's points:
1. To begin with, there was absolutely nothing about Venezuela or
Haiti - two of the more important hot spots in the world today.
Reply: Best to concentrate on what is there, not on what is not there. Louis
underestimates very much the attack of Richard
I think it was good of Juriann Bendian to raise it, and bad
for Sabri to curtly dismiss his effort as a bad essay without any
explanation except derivative are dangerous (indeed) and to invite me to
kiss his sweet cheeks for pursuing the thread.
Don't worry about that. Sabri is really talking
a) prohibit the $130 trillion trade in derivatives altogether.
It is not a $130 trillion trade in derivatives, if you want to be precise.
The trade is a contractual assurance exchanged for a fee. That BIS estimate,
refers to the value of the underlying asset (tangible or financial), which
is
One of the problems with a capitalist society (or, more generally, a
commodity-producing one) is that market competition encourages rampant
individualism and instrumentalism, undermining the needed fellow-feeling and
trust.
A problem I think is that many leftist politico's think that solidarity
That's because he is in exile.
Yes, I knew that. My own exile is more self-imposed, to the extent that,
after what happened to me, basically I just want to shut a lot of stuff out,
so that I concentrate better on saying and doing what I mean, and not what I
do not mean, or what other people
BBC World service this week featured a programme about drums quoting a
Paul Barnes saying that the earliest evidence for human music making
goes back 30-35 thousand years ago
Well you shouldn't believe just any sort of sexed-up English story, you
know. There's the serious side of the BBC and
Why not simply say that human relationships are bound by love. After all,
contracts are always conditional, whereas love is not.
Let's have a think. This idea would possibly help to explain why many people
disparage free love so much, as a dreamy hippy phenomenon, applying only
to marginalised
Peter Drucker, the doyen of the management community, claims that 90
percent of all financial transactions in the world have no relationship with
either production or trade [of tangible goods and services]. Drucker refers
to this as the growth of the symbol economy (see Peter Drucker, The New
ROADSIDE BOMB
Shakespeare wrote once that all's fair in love and war. Associated Press
just now reports that in Tikrit, a roadside bomb killed two American
soldiers and wounded three this Saturday. They were the first casualties
suffered by a new US army regiment taking over security in Saddam
Reflecting on Robbie Williams, Dutch journalist Jan Kuitenbrouwer has some
interesting backchat comments on the critique of the political economy of
consumption, in a recent issue of the middleclass Hague Post/Time magazine
(12 March 2004 issue, p. 90), of which I have translated this excerpt:
I
Jim wrote:
I think that Sabri goes much too far. All contracts -- including unsigned
ones -- are based on trust, not love. (...) One of the problems with a
capitalist society (or, more generally, a commodity-producing one) is that
market competition encourages rampant individualism and
Have you seen the movie?
No, not yet, but intend to see it when I am thinking about my father again.
Jurriaan
I wrote:
But this story has another implication. As I have said previously, the
perfect crime is the crime which is not a crime since then it considered a
crime, and can be prosecuted legally as such.
That should obviously be:
But this story has another implication. As I have said previously,
There's got to be a way to find my way to heaven, cuz I did my time in hell,
to paraphrase Keith Richards. Actually, I quite like short skirts on women,
but then, I'm a man. I haven't got time just now to go into a whole
dialectical analysis of Dutch Treat, but thanx for the comment.
J.
Banking is one of Israel's largest industries. In 1996, the banking industry
(1) generated NIS 15,250 million ($4,690 million) in added value, (2)
accounting for 8 percent of business sector product and 20 percent of total
product in trade and services. (...) http://www.iasps.org.il/bank.htm
The above is true only if they have the reigns in
their hands. Just as they can make more money faster,
they can lose more money equally faster, if they don't
have the reigns in their hands.
If you think it's not a good essay, I'd like to know more specifically why,
so that I improve. See for
I previously sent this to some friends, thought I would post it - maybe
useful for other PEN-Lers. They're URLs of sites which give campaign
contributions to parties in the United States. So if you want more details
on campaign finance, these links might help you out.
Frank Partnoy's book suggests that most derivatives exist in order to
get around financial regulations.
That's true in my opinion, although originally that wasn't so much the case.
The question nowadays regularly arises as to what compliance to the law
would mean. It's part of a larger greedy
I believe this song (Robert Gordon ?) is very popular in Iraq again.I'm drivin' in my car, you turn on the radio
I'm pullin' you close, but you just say no
You say you don't like it, but girl I know you're a liar
'Cause when we kiss, ooh, fire
Late at night, I'm chasin you home
I say I wanna
why send the lyrics to the list? It does not add much.
Sorry. A bit of dark sarcasm. I'll try to be more constructive and observe
good style. Okay then. From a linguistic point of view, in American idiom,
the expression America's love affair with..., America's love of/with...
etc. is in truth
Just to add to Yoshie's comment: looks to me as though the real finish of
neoliberalism is necessarily the extensive privatisation of government
debts, but in a specific way. Suppose you have these government
institutions, and they have large debts. How then can you balance the budget
?
In New
As a characteristic neoliberal, Bagwhati actually denies economics is a
science. If all that is objective about society is actual prices paid, and
if there is market uncertainty, then you can never really know what the
aggregate effects of market forces will be, and there can be no economic
laws,
Mel Gibson's Lethal Religion
Mel Gibson has laid a cuckoo's egg in the nest of American Christianity.
What he has hatched in US cinemas is a quasi-pagan throwback to the
sepulchral old-world cult that the United States was set up to oppose. The
US is a by-product of the Protestant Reformation's
As ticket sales for the Australian superstar-filmmaker's gory,
blood-drenched cinematic interpretation of the last 12 hours of Jesus
Christ's life surpassed the US$200 million mark less than two weeks after
its Ash Wednesday release, the debate over whether the movie is anti-Semitic
in its intent
The derivatives market has expanded enormously in recent years, with
investment banks selling billions of dollars worth of contracts to
capitalists as a way to minimise loss of their capital through unforeseen
market fluctuations that could possibly lower its value (what Marx called
Looks like I'm back on PEN-L after all, but hopefully more sparingly... I
don't know what these comrades are talking about here, but then again, I
realise I'm not an American.
In a lead-up to the election, the candidates normally try to sound out or
air views to find a consensus or base for
I will just post a digressive comment I made to Chris Doss, with some
additions, in case anybody is interested in this type of issue. As I told
Chris, I know little about contemporary Russia. I think the main thing to
note is that the black and grey economy (or the shadow economy) in Russia
is so
Jim wrote:
one thing that's striking is how humble Bush acted in the 2000 presidential
debates and how arrogant his administration has been.
Quite. Maybe like that song Oh Lord it is hard to be humble ?. To arrogate
is to claim or seize without real justification, or to make undue claims to
After the second world war, the Middle East was said to have perhaps 16
million barrels in oil reserves (deposits), by 1967 the estimate had risen
to 250 billion barrels, in the 1990s it reached 500 billion, and now it's
at over 900 billion barrels or close to a trillion.
In approximate figures,
Jim wrote:
I think the Bushmasters are arrogant because of their long experience with
having power (as part of the economic or military elite). Bush and the like
went to elite schools, etc., etc.
Quite. You say it very succinctly. But here's some additional comments, for
the more patient
Joanna wrote:
It's funny how a rational centrist (Krugman) can sound like a raving
socialist these days.
So what is the point of this ? This type of comment is useless in my view,
and I will say why. What is the purpose, beyond trying to show how savvy or
smart you are about the latest
Book Review - Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis. New York, Seven
Stories Press, 2003.
While the US prison population has surpassed 2 million people, this figure
is more than 20 percent of the entire global imprisoned population combined.
Angela Y. Davis shows, in her most recent book, Are
So, Sweezy wished to clarify the meanings of the terms socialism
and communism by saying that the law of value still continues to
operate under socialism to the extent that economy is capitalistic,
i.e., governed by market discipline, whereas it won't under communism
worth its name. As Jim
this is sort of circular isn't it? or is it that only the rest of us are
to learn?
That depends on your definition of agreement and disagreement. Obviously I
am not arguing that only the rest of us should learn. For Marx, learning
is a process of dialog.
J.
Kenan Malik argues at http://www.kenanmalik.com/essays/die.html that:
(1) The purpose of a language is functional: to enable communication. I
think this is simplistic and question-begging because it fails to specify
exactly what a language is or how exactly language enables communication.
Well I think that substantiates your argument and my argument. I think David
Schanoes is entitled to his viewpoint, but surely if a pithy article is
written in the NYT explaining what is wrong with Greenspan's idea, then that
helps us much more than a bunch of abuse and character assasination ?
I get the feeling that the international financial system is perhaps the
weakest link in the whole world economy.
That is a very long story, and, apart from requiring further research, in
one mail I can only do a bit of justice to your important economic question.
The question I would ask, is
What character assassination? He did recommend Keating. He did tell
Thailand to eat baht. He did recommend increased SS taxes, and if you
look
several years back at his Congressional testimony, you'll see him stating
that SS was not facing financial ruin due to the pre-collection scheme.
I
Marx wrote: The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various
ways; the point is to change it (Die Philosophen haben die Welt nur
verschieden interpretiert; es kommt aber darauf an, sie zu verändern).
Alvin Gouldner then philosophises: Marxism is not attempting simply to
understand
Next thing you'll be telling us is that Jack Welch is a great leader of
men
and women with a misquided theory, Kissinger is a great diplomat with a
mistaken world view, Oliver North is a real humanitarian who made a poor
career choice.
That is why I associate with few Marxists, because they
Follow the cash. It's that simple. If it were any more difficult,
Greenspan would be flipping burgers at McDonald's.
Okay.
J.
what obliges people to change the system? Marx took for granted the
general antipathy of the socialist and communist movements of his day toward
capitalism.
Jim,
I agree with the substance of what you say. But in your last sentence, I am
inclined to think this ignores that it isn't pretty
That, the above, was/is the sole and whole reason I took issue with JB's
characterization of AG as a deep economic thinker with a wrong theory.
One thing David Schanoes is very good at is falsely presenting somebody
else's point of view. On previous occasions he has written to me or about me
about herself: a puberal girl who dreams of freedom, love and
her own life. She tells the story from her fourteenth to her seventeenth
year, with many puberal escapades in it. We'd rather have these strong
women, than a few old lesbians who are still living in the past.
(translation by Jurriaan Bendien
I didn't think that what David wrote was abuse and character
assassination. Impassioned critique perhaps. Pointing out some very
obvious and noxious facts abut Mr. G
That shows more about what you are than about Al Greenspan and David
Schanoes.
J.
I agree with your critique of Marxism
Feminism and Marxism are oppressive if they tell you what you should do or
think, rather than explain and exemplify why you should do it.
J.
unless he works hard to meet their needs. Frankly Juriaan, you
surprise me. You, of all people, are perfectly aware of the mediocrity and
shalowness that characterizes a lot of economic stars. It is no different in
economics than in society at large. The shit rises to the top. I see this
The shit rises to the top because the game is not about innovation or
creativity or productivity...but about collaboration.
That's like saying, it all depends on who you want to work with. As a
technical writer, you should know that shit is produced through digesting
food. Food enters the
Your remarks are irrelevant, because it ignores what currency hedging
expresses.
One more point-- your remarks to Joanna Bujes are completely out of line
and
have no place in public communications.
Okay Mr FBI, perhaps you ought to get it on with Joanna. You just try to
show how smart you
You are really smart.
J.
i realize that part of above is rhetorical flourish but...
re. pfp in 68: cleaver doug dowd (bless his heart) were on ballot in
12-13-14 states, received about 75,000 votes nationwide, made no
difference in any state (which is what folks must focus on re. prez
Chris comments: BTW [the author, John Dolan] not Russian; he's a US
citizen who taught English in Auckland, NZ, for several years and then
relocated to Moscow. His wife is a New Zealander.
J.
I have an article posted on the Monthly Review website (www.monthlyreview.org) titled "Can the
Working Class Change the World?" It is a write up of a talk I gave to the
Marxist School in Sacramento. Comments welcome.
I think the working class not only can change the world,
but does change
I am very sad hearing that news and want to say something. I never met him
personally but I knew him through his writings which made a lasting
impression. He wasn't just a great publicist, an independent, pioneering
American socialist, a team worker, and a great, cultured scholar, but he was
also
A 35-strong group of rejected asylum seekers called A Long Walk to Freedom
(recalling the title of Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela's book, and the Chinese
national liberation war) is on a 234km long march from Groningen in the
far north of The Netherlands to the Parliament Building in The Hague, in
On 16 november 2003 I posted a critical comment on a book by Brookings
Institution authors about Siberia on Marxmail and PEN-L. Here is another one
by a Russian author that is much better (thanks to Chris for drawing my
attention to it):
Every year or so, another silly theory comes into vogue
if the data is poorly measured, then even a case where there are no
empirical counterexamples may be wrong.
Jim D.
Of course, that's possible, yes.
J.
Bush thinks that homoskedasticity is unnatural and is going to ban any
talk
of it in government funded statistical studies. Only observations that are
heteroskedastic will be allowed.
Thanks. I'm not actually gay, but I had a lot of sexual harassment in the
past, you end up doing things you
if so, we agree.
I cannot think of anytime I disagreed with you. The more I think about this,
the more I think I disagree only with the people I disagree with, but, one
always has to keep that critical inquiry going and not tule out the
possibility you might disagree.
It's also extremely hard to
Any sweeping change in technology is not without its challenges.
The Election Technology Council understands that while DRE systems offer the
American public substantial advantages, it is natural that questions about
the security of these newer systems will be asked. The ETC is ready, willing
I cannot vote Nader from here, but I'll work on the campaign financing.
J.
I hear that Gibson's film is soft on the empire and tough on the
mob and the national elite. It's a fitting blockbuster for the New
American Century.
Well put. Maybe ought to reread Canetti anyhow.
J.
In the US Bureau of Labor Statistics current population survey, who counts
as being part of the Institutionalized population and thus is excluded
from the labor force? Are prisoners who are paid to answer phones (etc.)
part of the paid labor force and employment?
The US non-institutional
http://economics.about.com/cs/economicsglossary/g/heteroskedastic.htm
which tells us that such a beast does exist. and i thought i earned my
math degree with higher grades than sonofabush!
I think the definition isn't very good. Heteroskedasticity and
homoskedasticity really refer to the
you admire this piece of shit? Well, as we used to
say,
There it is. Which means... No sense talking about it.
dms
- Original Message -
From: Jurriaan Bendien [EMAIL PROTECTED]
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Sent: Thursday, February 26, 2004 8:23 PM
Subject: Re: [PEN-L] demo fervor
The ultimate argument of the bourgeoisie? It's not about buying and
selling, it's about aiming and firing.
Not sure I agree - it seems often more firing and then aiming, i.e. shoot
first and talk later. I am not immune to lapses of temper or swearing
myself, but I prefer really to restrict
strictly speaking, no propositions at all can be proved with statistics.
All one can say is that your hypothesis survived a statistical test.
True, but it occurs to me that this might be too strongly worded, insofar as
SOME propositions could be proved with statistics. For example, take
Især hos Marx og Engels fremtræder sammenhængen mellem deres udsagn og deres
teoris forskellige dele tydeligt. En kronologisk fortløbende, sammenhængende
udgivelse ville derfor have været bedre, har det været hævdet. Det er et
rimeligt standpunkt, men afgørelsen er truffet for længst. MEGA kommer
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