LAT: Pentagon Corruption almost Tammany in its ripeness
[Hey, we won the war! Isn't it in our interests that [Americans like my friends get the contract instead of stinking Europeans! So what if US forces die in the short term for lack of good communications. I'm talking long term.] http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/iraq/la-na-iraqphones29apr29,1,3312797.story?coll=la-home-headlines Contract Causes Inquiry at Pentagon By T. Christian Miller, Times Staff Writer WASHINGTON -- A senior Defense Department official is under investigation by the Pentagon inspector general for allegations that he attempted to alter a contract proposal in Iraq to benefit a mobile phone consortium that includes friends and colleagues, according to documents obtained by The Times and sources with direct knowledge of the process. John A. Shaw, 64, the deputy undersecretary for international technology security, sought to transform a relatively minor police and fire communications proposal into a contract allowing the creation of an Iraq-wide commercial cellular network that could generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per year, the sources said. Shaw brought pressure on officials at the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad to change the contract language and grant the consortium a noncompetitive bid, according to the sources. The consortium, under the guidance of a firm owned by Alaskan natives, consisted of an Irish telecommunications entrepreneur, former officials in the first Bush administration and such leading telecommunications companies as Lucent and Qualcomm, according to sources and consortium members. Shaw's efforts resulted in a dispute at the Coalition Provisional Authority that has delayed the contract, depriving U.S. military officials and Iraqi police officers, firefighters, ambulance drivers and border guards of a joint communications system. That has angered top U.S. officials and members of the U.S.-led authority governing Iraq, who say the deaths of many Americans and Iraqis might have been prevented with better communications. In interviews, Shaw said he had a long-standing personal relationship with at least one member of the consortium, but had no financial ties or agreement with the consortium for future employment. One other member of the consortium's board of directors is under contract with his office as a researcher. Shaw said he was trying to help the group because it could quickly install the police and fire communications system, and because the group was using a U.S.-based cellphone technology called CDMA that had lost out in what he called a rigged competition last year for commercial licenses in Iraq. Three companies using European-based technology won contracts. Additionally, Shaw said that he had been contacted by Rep. Darrell E. Issa, a Republican whose San Diego County district was packed with Qualcomm employees, and the office of Republican Sen. Conrad R. Burns of Montana, the head of the Commerce Committee's communications subcommittee, urging him to ensure that U.S. technology was allowed to compete for cellular phone contracts in Iraq. Issa confirmed they he had contacted Shaw on the issue. Burns' office did not respond to inquiries. CDMA, which was developed by Qualcomm, is used in the United States and some countries in Asia. Its rival, a standard developed by Europeans called GSM, is used in the U.S., Europe and the Middle East. Hey, we won the war, Shaw said in an interview. Is it not in our interests to have the most advanced system that we possibly can that can then become the dominant standard in the region? The Pentagon's Defense Criminal Investigative Services, a unit of the inspector general, began its investigation after two senior officials with the U.S.-led coalition authority reported that Shaw had demanded that they make the changes to the contract. They refused. Daniel Sudnick, who was the senior advisor to Iraq's minister of communications, the highest-ranking American in the ministry, and Bonnie Carroll, a chief deputy, resigned this month. A Pentagon spokeswoman said the inspector general was unable to discuss this matter at this time. Carroll declined comment Wednesday. Sudnick issued a statement denying Shaw's charges of corruption in the original cellular license award that he helped to oversee. Together with my team, we were singularly instrumental in putting modern communications in place that never existed in Iraq before, Sudnick said. No one, doing it properly and carefully, and avoiding the misuse of taxpayers' dollars, could have done it any faster. The inquiry into Shaw's actions is believed to be the first for a senior Pentagon official in connection with the massive $18.4-billion package funded by U.S. taxpayers to help rebuild Iraq. According
France: frontiers of corruption
Gigantic sleaze scandal winds up as former Elf oil chiefs are jailed Trial for huge kickbacks by publicly owned firm reveals years of corruption at top of French state Jon Henley in Paris Thursday November 13, 2003 The Guardian France's mammoth Elf corruption case, probably the biggest political and corporate sleaze scandal to hit a western democracy since the second world war, drew to a close yesterday as three key former executives of the oil giant were jailed for up to five years. Elf's former chairman, Loik Le Floch-Prigent, 60, was sentenced to five years in jail and fined 375,000 (260,724); his principal bag-man, the former director Alfred Sirven, was given the same prison term and ordered to pay 1m. The company's Mr Africa, Andr Tarallo, was jailed for four years and fined 2m. The judge, Michel Desplan, said Le Floch bore the primary responsibility for the Elf affair and was personally behind a majority of the misappropriations. To Sirven, he said: All this would not have happened without Le Floch, but it could not have existed without your help. The three were among 37 defendants on trial for illegally siphoning off an extraordinary 350m of the then state-owned company's funds, from 1989 to 1993, while Le Floch was chairman. The never-ending stream of cash was used to buy political favours at home and abroad, and to fund some extravagant lifestyles. But the four-month trial, which had France riveted with its tales of political graft and sumptuous living, was also that of a system of state-sanctioned sleaze that flourished in France for years: successive politicians saw the country's state-owned multinationals not just as undercover foreign policy tools, but as a convenient source of ready cash to keep friends happy and enemies quiet. Le Floch, whose lawyer said yesterday his client would not be appealing to the court, insisted throughout his trial that he was in daily contact with the Elyse palace, and that all the presidents of France had known of, and condoned, the company's illicit dealings. Elf, now privatised and part of the Total group, paid at the very least 5m a year to all of the main French political parties to buy their support, Le Floch told the court at one stage. Most of the money went to the centre-right RPR party founded by the present president, Jacques Chirac, until the socialist Franois Mitterrand, soon after his presidential election in 1982, demanded that the spoils be evenly spread In their 1,045-page indictment and a further 44,000 pages of documents, the investigating magistrates described in detail a large number of operations carried out on the margins of normal functioning of the group's structures, and destined... to collect assets off the books. In addition to jail terms totalling 60 years, the public prosecutors sought a record 34.5m in fines against the 37 defendants, who included business associates of the company and executives' relatives accused of having benefited from illegal largesse. Among those sentenced yesterday was Le Floch's former wife, Fatima Belaid, found guilty of receiving 4.6m from Elf in exchange for her silence over the company's underhand dealings after the couple agreed to divorce. She was sentenced to three years in prison, of which two were suspended, and fined 1m. Many of the missing millions were paid out in illegal royalties to various African leaders and their families. Tarallo told the court in June that annual cash transfers totalling about 10m were made to Omar Bongo, Gabon's president, while other huge sums were paid to leaders in Angola, Cameroon and Congo-Brazzaville. The multi-million dollar payments were partly aimed at guaranteeing that it was Elf and not US or British firms that pumped the oil, but also to ensure the African leaders' continued allegiance to France. In Gabon, Elf was a veritable state within a state. France accounts for three-quarters of foreign investment in Gabon, and Gabon sometimes provided 75% of Elf's profits. In return for protection and sweeteners from Elf's coffers, France used the state as a base for military and espionage activities in west Africa. Illegal commissions were also paid to businessmen and third-party associates to smooth Elf's business dealings closer to home: about 30m was paid out under the counter in the company's 1992 acquisition of the Leuna refinery in east Germany. Among those sentenced yesterday were Nadhmi Auchi, an Iraqi-born British billionaire, who was fined 2m over a 1992 transaction with Elf, and Dieter Holzer, a German businessman, who was accused of taking kickbacks on the Leuna deal, and given 15 months in jail and a fine of 1.5m. But the bulk of yesterday's convictions focused on the way Elf's senior executives shamelessly enriched themselves. Michel Desplan, the judge, told Le Floch he was the source of most of the misappropriations... carried out to enrich yourself personally. Le Floch was found guilty of personally misappropriating 180m, while Sirven
Lakoff was More on anti-corruption
Greetings Pen 'Ellers, Thanks Joanna for forwarding Lakoff's interview. I've enjoyed reading Lakoff, especially on philosophy and mathematics. Lakoff argues for 'embodiment' which I think helps to clarify the many muddy arguments about cognition and dissipate the mind duality that permeates the culture in the developed countries. Additionally, Lakoff was a student of Chomsky's and participated in the so-called language wars and broke with Chomsky over the issue of inheriting a grammar structure in the brain. So Lakoff to my way of understanding things, continues a solid left historical perspective on thought. Given that, Lakoff's approach to moral systems seems to me to have some problems. First is interpretation of framing to use in language to bind a social community. It seems to me not so obvious as Lakoff makes his system seem that framing can be used to build a left movement. What seems to me to be missing is a way to map a moral system so we can build with it. My first guess about moral systems is that they reflect values or the structure of emotion that binds cortex structures together. So if we talk about moral systems we have to really have a grasp of emotional structure as well as the language structures of metaphor. Secondly while Lakoff has powerful things to say about metaphor, and extremely useful, it seems to me that the structure of using that is not well addressed. What I imagine in this case is that an architecture of moral systems is possible to consider. This sort of reasoning on my part looks rather like the historical processes that religions try to accomplish. Essentially how to construct societies on the larger and larger scale where everyone can be together in very large units. To give an example if one considers the bible as an example, the prohibitions against killing probably reflected the conflict structure of groups being modified for a larger tribal structure than nomadic peoples previously could not have considered. In other words the emotion structure that previously led to groups killing individuals was being modified to adapt to a much larger social structure. Emotion structure underlies 'moral' systems. Moral systems as I think Lakoff rightly observes are metaphorical, i.e. neural network like, but without an adequate theory of value (emotion structure) using just metaphor is to me a laborious endeavor to track down how words are currently being used. This neglects the change that happens in word usage as well. If one incorporates emotion structure into a metaphorical system I think one could look at that as well as a labor process. So that to take the metaphor of architecture a step further, each person constantly helps build an overall 'moral' system of the whole society. So that we might consider how to automate parts of the architecture to increase productivity. thanks, Doyle
Re: The concept of corruption
I don't feel the need to be a dictionary every time discussion of terms comes up. ... no, you don't have to provide definitions all the time. But if you reject some definition of some word (e.g., corruption) it seems that you have some alternative definition in mind, which you should share with us, at least if you want to have a serious discussion of the issues. Alternatively, you shouldn't use the word in question in any kind of serious conversation. BTW, I reject the Platonic view that definitions correspond to ideal forms that exist outside of our consciousness of them, so that perceived corruption (etc.) represents merely phenomenal forms of the ideal. Rather, any definition is provisional, used to clarify thought, organize empirical investigation, provide greater understanding, etc. concerning the perceived empirical world. (Similarly, all scientific conclusions are really working hypotheses.) No definition is hard and fast. Thus, the rejection of a definition because it's not hard and fast seems a rejection of definitions in general. JD
Re: The concept of corruption
I have no idea how to define corruption. Corporate campaign contributions seem corrupt to me, but not according to American standards. Appointing right-wing hacks to the courts and other political positions since corrupt. Giving away a public resources seem corrupt. Clinton using his power of office to gain sexual favors change corrupt; professors are not immune from such corruption. To others, violations of biblical law seem corrupt. In short, a concept like this defies definition. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: The concept of corruption
Judge John T. Noonan has a big and interesting book on the history of corruption, Bribery (1984), really a fascinating read. Standards definitely evolve. In the early common law, it was normal for judges to take gifts from litigants. By the time of Francis Bacon, impeached for corruption from the post of Lord Chancellor (Chief Justice in the Court of Equity) in around 1620, the argument that the gifts did not influence the decision was not accepted in England. Here is a link to a short paper that providesa lighting survey by a lawyer who has to deal with this stuff every day http://www.transparency.ca/Readings/TI-G02.pdf --- Michael Perelman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I have no idea how to define corruption. Corporate campaign contributions seem corrupt to me, but not according to American standards. Appointing right-wing hacks to the courts and other political positions since corrupt. Giving away a public resources seem corrupt. Clinton using his power of office to gain sexual favors change corrupt; professors are not immune from such corruption. To others, violations of biblical law seem corrupt. In short, a concept like this defies definition. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] __ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/
Re: The concept of corruption
In short, a concept like this defies definition. I don't think that's true, Marx would say, definitions of corruption are historically relative. But in the foundations of bourgeois society and moral thinking, corruption just means unfair competition, and this is normally legally defined. But since it is impossible to provide a complete legal definition, since the dimensions of competition are always changing, the concept always remains a little vague, there is a grey area. And so for example we could dispute about the legality and morality of the business annexation of Iraq - when is expropriation justified, or not ? How does this fit into moral rationality ? The real point is that the market provides no morality of its own, except what is technically necessary to conclude a market transaction, and that competition, rooted in conflicts over private property, itself gives rise to vagueness. J.
Re: More on anti-corruption
- Original Message - From: Jurriaan Bendien [EMAIL PROTECTED] Anti-corruption information at http://www.nobribes.org/ and www.transparency.org . Transparency International has branches in several countries. For the Global Corruption Report 2003, see http://www.globalcorruptionreport.org/download.shtml Some of the analytical methods in these reports point precisely to the weakness of the definition of corruption given earlier. *Corruption is defined as the abuse of public power for private gain.* Rather than simply contest the definition, I'll relay a story and try to keep it short. A couple of years ago I was at a debate between a former Canadian MP, then working at the Canadian Consulate in Seattle, and a friend as well as one of those eminently replaceable PR people from the Chamber of Commerce. During the Q A the guy from Canada told how -I'm paraphrasing and compressing, in Canada, he was given $25,000 to run his election campaign, the reporting requirements and the like and if I spent one dollar over that amount I would be thrown in jail for [X] years. By this standard your American system is totally corrupt. He then went into a not too short excursus on the problems of political patronage as they relate to trade issues. Now, given the above definition, nothing US elected representatives do is considered corruption precisely because they are not abusing public office for private gain. They are simply using it to grant advantages to their campaign contributors. Sure it lines the coffers of the two parties, which after all, are caught up in the accumulation game themselves. Yet the system of political patronage in the US is not that different from the corruption many see in African states. Indeed one could make the argument that what has gone on in Africa for the last 50 years is not much different from the settling of the US in the nineteenth century. And yet the US scores rather well compared to say, Nigeria on the corruption index. Most US citizens casually perusing left-liberal muckraking journalism on campaign contributions etc. have no problem seeing the current system in place as corrupt, yet their intuitions, which I have enormous sympathies with, are not captured in the above definition precisely because those in power have legalized the ever evolving norms of patronage as the political economy changes and grows. Hence the above definition is too thin precisely because it creates a blind spot regarding how the corruption got legitimated -cumulative causation and all that. I take the current structuring of patronage as just so much of a 'objectified corruption' as many commonly refer to capital as 'objectified labor' or 'dead labor.' Yet the moment we let the above definition serve as the baseline norm from which many other forms of corruption are excluded by definition, we concede too much to the political parties that are ruining governments across the planet. A perfect example is the SC passing Buckley v. Valeo. Am I the only one to see the corrupt conflict of interests involved in having Republican and Democrat judges legitimize the idea of money as speech which just so happens to ensure an enormous stream of cash for the parties of which they are members? I don't think so and neither do all the solid people pushing for substantive campaign finance reform, yet the above definition kind of pre-empts their ability to call the current system corrupt. If we say that the political process by which property rights are constructed and delegated to agents in the economy is not corrupt precisely because those who hold office have legalized the process whereby money is exchanged in order to secure legislation favorable to some interests vis a vis other interests by any definition of corruption [attuned to historical facts as much as the analytical coherence of our definition etc.] we care to articulate, then what is the normative basis from which we can declare that capitalist systems of property and contract are violative of the norms of democratic liberalism itself -freedom/justice etc.? Clearly the definition of corruption above attempts to define away the historical process whereby capitalist property rights became institutionalized even as we see how corruption today with the above definition, in many cases, bears an uncanny resemblance to the manner in which so-called primitive accumulation many centuries ago brought forth capitalism as we know it today. Usual caveats, Ian
Re: More on anti-corruption
These days the bourgeoisie likes to plunder with love. Privacy ? We will provide it for the working class. Lovers ? We will provide them for the working class. Jobs ? We will provide them for the working class ? Human decency ? We will provide it for the working class. The bourgeois are bourgeois, for the benefit of the working class. But you must remember, there is always a sackrifice to be made, and you must remember that Jesus Christ died on the cross for all our sins. And thus the blood shed in our humanitarian effort to integrate people into a peaceful market is not in vain, and history shall absolve us after we are dead. Jurriaan
Re: The concept of corruption
Right: definitions -- such as that of corruption -- are historically relative. Corruption is defined _relative to_ bourgeois right, which is something that changes over time. It involves breaking the rules of the capitalist game. Though the main rules are pretty much the same, the details differ between places and times. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: Jurriaan Bendien [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, November 03, 2003 10:45 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] The concept of corruption In short, a concept like this defies definition. I don't think that's true, Marx would say, definitions of corruption are historically relative. But in the foundations of bourgeois society and moral thinking, corruption just means unfair competition, and this is normally legally defined. But since it is impossible to provide a complete legal definition, since the dimensions of competition are always changing, the concept always remains a little vague, there is a grey area. And so for example we could dispute about the legality and morality of the business annexation of Iraq - when is expropriation justified, or not ? How does this fit into moral rationality ? The real point is that the market provides no morality of its own, except what is technically necessary to conclude a market transaction, and that competition, rooted in conflicts over private property, itself gives rise to vagueness. J.
Anti-corruption - addition
I wrote: But you must remember, there is always a sackrifice to be made, and you must remember that Jesus Christ died on the cross for all our sins. I should perhaps note, that the Pound of Flesh theorem mentioned by Shakespeare in The Merchant of Venice is not appropriate here, we must definitely talk about Christian Sacrifice, because the Pound of Flesh theorem is anti-semitic, and the suffering Lord Jesus is a universal symbol of good intentions rooted in the ultimate premise of loving your enemy. My fellow Americans, if the market does not provide morality of its own, private expropriation must be balanced by public sacrifice, otherwise we cannot reconcile our consolidated accounts. You must give, so that I may receive, and you must BELIEVE that this generous giving WILL cause you to receive the bountiful resources God has created through your generous love - in time, perhaps not immediately, but in the future. Knock, and the door shall open. The Kingdom of Heaven shall be opened to you, if you believe in the Good Lord Jesus who suffering was not in vain, and who provides a shining light, a radiant light, which illuminates the justice of expropriation and the justice of sacrifice, showing us, that there is a deeper meaning in history, which you young fellows cannot yet understand, but in time, you will understand, when you are older. And in the meantime, today, right now, we must fight the terrorists in the name of Our Lord Jesus, because the terrorists could attack any minute, they could strike anywhere, and they could disturb the market, and if they disturb the market, people will die because of that, and we cannot allow that to happen. We see already the great dangers in Iraq when the market is disturbed, these people have terrible problems. We must protect the market and we must protect the values of this great nation. And because we are inspired, we are fullfilled with the love of Jesus Christ, we will win, because we are invincible. And thus if some Chinese politicians resist our attempt to improve the global economy, and if Iraqi's resist our attempt to improve their country and enjoy all the bountiful resources that everybody has here in America, at great expense to Americans, then we shall persuade them, and we shall convince them, that they should not listen to misleaders and terrorists. And we are not distracted in our goal of human liberation, and we are not distracted by sophist arguments about national sovereignity, because the Human Race is One, and it belongs in One Great Marketplace, One Great Unionisation of mankind, One Great Globalisation and we shall get there. Okay, maybe we find that we must administer another country, because competent people are not available yet, maybe we have to create protected zones to protect the less fortunate citizens in our society, as well as free-trade zones where good, strong, healthy Americans can compete, and take on the challenges of modern business. We do so with Christian Compassion. Maybe we have to operate different currencies in one country, so that oil profits are protected from abuse from corrupt individuals, because as you know, not all people will the good, and we must live with the fact that there are evil forces at work in the world, satanic forces which seek to undermine our efforts to establish peace and a stable investment climate. But as we unify the human race through One Free Market, all these minor problems WILL be resolved, and we shall create prosperity for ALL, and redeem ALL the human errors of the past, turning all negatives into positives. We realise full well, that errors can and will be made, but we must always focus back on the goal, the aim of the whole enterprise. We must ask ourselves, why are we in politics ? and remember our principles. And if we encounter adversities, problems, difficulties, then we must have faith, we must allow ourselves to be guided by Jesus Christ, our belief in God must be the foundation of our market activities and our private initiative which reaps the rewards of that initiative. And as regards those who seek to smear our good intentions, we will not be impressed by them, and we will expose them, and we will hunt them out, root them out, and bring them to justice. But the practical proof of our policy WILL convince people, and if it does not seem to convince sufficiently today, we must convince people that it WILL work in the future, and we must engender hope in the future, faith in the future, love for humanity, a positive view, market confidence, whereas our opponents are merely negative losers. We must take on this challenge like real men, and steel ourselves for the battles which lie ahead of us. And we must have respect for our brave soldiers who defend our freedoms in foreign lands, and protect us from terrorist Iraqi children. We do not know yet when the war will be over, we do not know yet when we will win, but we know that, with the love of Jesus Christ, we are invincible
Re: More on anti-corruption
And yet the US scores rather well compared to say, Nigeria on the corruption index... I agree that there's no way one could create a corruption index. It can't be quantified. Yet the moment we let the above definition serve as the baseline norm ... I didn't know that the discussion was normative in focus. As I noted, corruption is defined relative to bourgeois right, which is itself corrupt. Jim
Re: More on anti-corruption
- Original Message - From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] And yet the US scores rather well compared to say, Nigeria on the corruption index... I agree that there's no way one could create a corruption index. It can't be quantified. Yet the moment we let the above definition serve as the baseline norm ... I didn't know that the discussion was normative in focus. As I noted, corruption is defined relative to bourgeois right, which is itself corrupt. Jim All your response does is to push the baseline norm issue 'back' one step. Corruption as a sociological term is irreducibly normative. All hail the hermeneutic circle :- Ian
Re: More on anti-corruption
I agree that there's no way one could create a corruption index. It can't be quantified. You mean it is an externality cost and we cannot establish a price for it ? Then of course it must be corruption ! A respected Jungian psychotherapist once told me that Marx was rubbish and I should drop that for my mental health's sake. It occurred to me that of course Marx had to be rubbish, because Marx operates with a concept of economic value which cannot be quantified. Or so they say. J.
Re: More on anti-corruption
The physics formula F = M.a is circular, because each term is defined by the other two. The concept of a point in geometry is also circular. These examples (and many others) suggest that there is nothing wrong with circular definitions, as long as one is clear about the nature of that circularity. of course, corruption is normative in the sense that it violates (official) bourgeois norms. But I didn't know that _pen-l's_ discussion was normative, i.e., that someone was proposing that corruption was _the_ problem to be opposed or something like that. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine -Original Message- From: Eubulides [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, November 03, 2003 1:08 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [PEN-L] More on anti-corruption - Original Message - From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] And yet the US scores rather well compared to say, Nigeria on the corruption index... I agree that there's no way one could create a corruption index. It can't be quantified. Yet the moment we let the above definition serve as the baseline norm ... I didn't know that the discussion was normative in focus. As I noted, corruption is defined relative to bourgeois right, which is itself corrupt. Jim All your response does is to push the baseline norm issue 'back' one step. Corruption as a sociological term is irreducibly normative. All hail the hermeneutic circle :- Ian
Re: More on anti-corruption
Isn't this thread getting corrupted? -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: More on anti-corruption
- Original Message - From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, November 03, 2003 1:24 PM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] More on anti-corruption The physics formula F = M.a is circular, because each term is defined by the other two. The concept of a point in geometry is also circular. These examples (and many others) suggest that there is nothing wrong with circular definitions, as long as one is clear about the nature of that circularity. = There are virtuous and vicious circles in philosophy of science, epistemology etc. You are on the edge of a vicious circle regarding the relation between corruption and bourgeois right. Walter Gallie, anyone? of course, corruption is normative in the sense that it violates (official) bourgeois norms. But I didn't know that _pen-l's_ discussion was normative, i.e., that someone was proposing that corruption was _the_ problem to be opposed or something like that. = The discussion was normative from the get go even as no one suggested that corruption was *the* problem. I'm done. Ian
Re: More on anti-corruption
of inquiry situated in a society based on competition for private property and class exploitation, which cannot be approached in a non-partisan way. I don't really think the dispute about corruption is about normative or non-normative, since we cannot very well be non-normative or non-partisan, all we can say is that we try to be objective in regard to the evidence, and distinguish between what we aim to explain as individuals, and general policies we might explicitly recommend. Modern bourgeois society, sinking into corruption, seeks to challenge individuals to moral integrity, but in so doing, it is forgotten that no final and consistent reconciliation between the individual and the community can be arrived at so long as competition based on private property and class exploitation exist, i.e. so long as the objective basis for moral behaviour does not exist. As I mentioned before, postmodernist relativism arises precisely out of the fact that the market is unable to reconcile individual and social responsibility, not even the cleverest social-democratic or liberal arguments can do that, and that is why we must resort to Jesus Christ. So the only honest thing to do is declare your partisanship, combat corruption with personal integrity, but have appropriate regard for the evidence pertaining to the case. This discussion relates, incidentally, to the concept of totalitarianism, because this concept implies that an idealist abstraction is forced on people in reality, violently, massively and comprehensively, and to this concept of totalitarianism, the concept of democratic pluralism is counter-posed. But the concept of pluralism, abstracted from context, is unable to provide any epistemic authority or adjudicate between views, because there is no non-pluralist method by which those criteria can be arrived at. Hence pluralism can lead to relativism which disorganises just as much. That is all to say, that bourgeois democracy is merely the framework within which fair competition can occur, and fair competition is pluralistic competition. Essentially an obsession with pluralism is rooted in the class interests of the middle class, the petty-bourgeoisie, which feels shut out from power by the corporations and the trade unions. If trade unions are weak, then corporations become the enemy, and democratic values are asserted against the corporations. In which case, corruption is anti-democratic, because for fair competition to function, personal integrity must be maintained. Behind all the conceptual disputes however is the material reality of the competitive market and class society. If the market does not provide any morality beyond the conditions required to operate a transaction, then all morality is relative, and the only things that are not relative but absolute, are the institutions which safeguard bourgeois private property relations. In this sense, the Iraq war is an attempt to establish market certainty, i.e. the certainty and security of private appropriation, even if in the immediate present it seems to create market uncertainty. Democracy is necessary to preserve integrity in market negotiations, but if the assertion of democratic rights threatens bourgeois private property relations, then it is argued democracy is either being insufficiently pluralist, or unfair, or a hidden form of totalitarianism. We only make progress if we extract the hidden logic behind the metaphors that paralyse our thinking. Jurriaan
Re: More on anti-corruption
Jurriaan Bendien wrote We only make progress if we extract the hidden logic behind the metaphors that paralyse our thinking. Yes. True. Interestingly enough, the following was posted to LBO a few days ago. I knew Lakoff at UC Berkeley when his star was rising. He was doing interesting work and so was his ex wife, Robin Lakoff. There's a lot to work through in his observations and suggestions, and I would be interested in a discussion if anyone cares to respond. I'm in deadline mode at work right now, which is why I haven't forwarded this sooner. But, hell, there's always the very late evening hours... Joanna __ Message: 3 From: alex lantsberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: LBO [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Sat, 1 Nov 2003 13:14:39 -0800 Subject: [lbo-talk] Lakoff on language and politics Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Framing the issues: UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff tells how conservatives use language to dominate politics By Bonnie Azab Powell, NewsCenter | 27 October 2003 BERKELEY With Republicans controlling the Senate, the House, and the White House and enjoying a large margin of victory for California Governor-elect Arnold Schwarzenegger, it's clear that the Democratic Party is in crisis. George Lakoff, a UC Berkeley professor of linguistics and cognitive science, thinks he knows why. Conservatives have spent decades defining their ideas, carefully choosing the language with which to present them, and building an infrastructure to communicate them, says Lakoff. The work has paid off: by dictating the terms of national debate, conservatives have put progressives firmly on the defensive. In 2000 Lakoff and seven other faculty members from Berkeley and UC Davis joined together to found the Rockridge Institute, one of the only progressive think tanks in existence in the U.S. The institute offers its expertise and research on a nonpartisan basis to help progressives understand how best to get their messages across. The Richard Rhoda Goldman Distinguished Professor in the College of Letters Science, Lakoff is the author of Moral Politics: How Liberals and Conservatives Think, first published in 1997 and reissued in 2002, as well as several other books on how language affects our lives. He is taking a sabbatical this year to write three books ? none about politics ? and to work on several Rockridge Institute research projects. In a long conversation over coffee at the Free Speech Movement Café, he told the NewsCenter's Bonnie Azab Powell why the Democrats just don't get it, why Schwarzenegger won the recall election, and why conservatives will continue to define the issues up for debate for the foreseeable future. Why was the Rockridge Institute created, and how do you define its purpose? I got tired of cursing the newspaper every morning. I got tired of seeing what was going wrong and not being able to do anything about it. The background for Rockridge is that conservatives, especially conservative think tanks, have framed virtually every issue from their perspective. They have put a huge amount of money into creating the language for their worldview and getting it out there. Progressives have done virtually nothing. Even the new Center for American Progress, the think tank that John Podesta [former chief of staff for the Clinton administration] is setting up, is not dedicated to this at all. I asked Podesta who was going to do the Center's framing. He got a blank look, thought for a second and then said, You! Which meant they haven't thought about it at all. And that's the problem. Liberals don't get it. They don't understand what it is they have to be doing. Rockridge's job is to reframe public debate, to create balance from a progressive perspective. It's one thing to analyze language and thought, it's another thing to create it. That's what we're about. It's a matter of asking 'What are the central ideas of progressive thought from a moral perspective?' How does language influence the terms of political debate? Language always comes with what is called framing. Every word is defined relative to a conceptual framework. If you have something like revolt, that implies a population that is being ruled unfairly, or assumes it is being ruled unfairly, and that they are throwing off their rulers, which would be considered a good thing. That's a frame. 'Conservatives understand what unites them, and they understand how to talk about it, and they are constantly updating their research on how best to express their ideas.' -George Lakoff If you then add the word voter in front of revolt, you get a metaphorical meaning saying that the voters are the oppressed people, the governor is the oppressive ruler, that they have ousted him and this is a good thing and all things are good now. All of that comes up when you see a headline like voter revolt ? something that most people read and never notice. But these things can be affected by reporters and very often, by the
Re: More on anti-corruption
- Original Message - From: joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jurriaan Bendien wrote We only make progress if we extract the hidden logic behind the metaphors that paralyse our thinking. == In the above, extract is a metaphor and the assertion itself relies on space/motion as a metaphor. Surely there are *other* ways of metaphorizing making progress. Nothing is hidden. [Wittgenstein]
Re: More on anti-corruption
In California they claim to have a handle on this problem, and ensure that through good sexual development all abstract concepts are correctly anchored in the brains of the individual, creating consistent behaviour in which no corruptions or inconsistencies can occur. And then they elect Arnold Schwarzendegger. J. - Original Message - From: Eubulides [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Tuesday, November 04, 2003 1:02 AM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] More on anti-corruption - Original Message - From: joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED] Jurriaan Bendien wrote We only make progress if we extract the hidden logic behind the metaphors that paralyse our thinking. == In the above, extract is a metaphor and the assertion itself relies on space/motion as a metaphor. Surely there are *other* ways of metaphorizing making progress. Nothing is hidden. [Wittgenstein]
Re: More on anti-corruption
--- joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED] forwarded this article for comment: Jurriaan Bendien wrote We only make progress if we extract the hidden logic behind the metaphors that paralyse our thinking. Yes. True. Interestingly enough, the following was posted to LBO a few days ago. I knew Lakoff at UC Berkeley when his star was rising. He was doing interesting work and so was his ex wife, Robin Lakoff. There's a lot to work through in his observations and suggestions, and I would be interested in a discussion if anyone cares to respond. I'm in deadline mode at work right now, which is why I haven't forwarded this sooner. But, hell, there's always the very late evening hours... Joanna __ From: alex lantsberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] Framing the issues: UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff tells how conservatives use language to dominate politics Conservatives use money to buy mouthpieces to set the political agenda. Whoever sets the agenda of a meeting can dominate the debate. This is something which most leftists should have digested by this day and age. By Bonnie Azab Powell, Conservatives have spent decades defining their ideas, carefully choosing the language with which to present them, and building an infrastructure to communicate them, says Lakoff. They hire a out a stable of intellectuals who then churn out appropriately worded documents which are given voice through their extensive ties to media conglomerates which, in turn, want to make money by selling ads to businesses. They won't be selling many ads to businesses if the ideas which they promote aren't pro-business. The work has paid off: by dictating the terms of national debate, conservatives have put progressives firmly on the defensive. This has a lot to do with the fact that most 'progressives' do not understand nor do they promote a critique of Capital. The conservatives set the political agenda (how best to run our country) and the 'progressives' respond to it in an equally pro-business way. snip.. Lakoff was quoted saying: The background for Rockridge is that conservatives, especially conservative think tanks, have framed virtually every issue from their perspective. They have put a huge amount of money into creating the language for their worldview and getting it out there. Stick a pin there. The conservatives have a lot of money. They put their money where their mouths are. They have an overwhelmingly loud voice as a result. Progressives have done virtually nothing. Even the new Center for American Progress, the think tank that John Podesta [former chief of staff for the Clinton administration] is setting up, is not dedicated to this at all. I asked Podesta who was going to do the Center's framing. He got a blank look, thought for a second and then said, You! Which meant they haven't thought about it at all. And that's the problem. Liberals don't get it. They don't understand what it is they have to be doing. The base of the left no longer understands the basic critique of the wages system to wit: the workers create all social wealth not found in Nature. The workers get only a small share of the wealth they create because the legal structures of the bourgeois State enforce a kind of legalized robbery from them. This robbery has become the norm. To go outside this norm (i.e. to use the State to tax the rich and funnel the money they've stolen back to the poor via programs) is to be labled silly or unrealistic by your average Joe on the street, who after all is said and done, aspires to one day be rich himself (women included of course). So, the conservatives set the political agenda. They appear more 'realistic' than the liberals. They are more realistic because they are not perceived as being namby-pamby. They let things work as they are supposed to (naturally, according to human nature) rewarding the most daring of the risk takers (isn't Bill Gates great!) with the greatest share of the wealth created by their employed wage-slaves. Liberals don't want to face up to this fact because they either fear the consequences of abolishing the wage system (Stalin tried that--well maybe). So, they remain forever as the image of those who would tax *US* and make *US* ever poorer and throw our tax money at trying to mollie-coddle the poor (who are really just lazy). Rockridge's job is to reframe public debate, to create balance from a progressive perspective. It's one thing to analyze language and thought, it's another thing to create it. That's what we're about. It's a matter of asking 'What are the central ideas of progressive thought from a moral perspective?' Stick another pin there. The left needs to see that the right appeals to self-interest both perceived and real. It should be fairly easy to turn the tables on the conservatives as the wages system is not in the self-interest of
The concept of corruption
Corruption is defined as the abuse of public power for private gain. Alexander Sack, the author and legal scholar of the doctrine of odious debts, included in his definition of odious debts, loans incurred by members of the government or by persons or groups associated with the government to serve interests manifestly personal -- interests that are unrelated to the interests of the State. Source: http://www.odiousdebts.org/odiousdebts/index.cfm?DSP=subcontentAreaID=163
Re: The concept of corruption
- Original Message - From: Jurriaan Bendien [EMAIL PROTECTED] Corruption is defined as the abuse of public power for private gain. === This is way too thin a definition of corruption. It concedes too much to methodological individualism. Ian Alexander Sack, the author and legal scholar of the doctrine of odious debts, included in his definition of odious debts, loans incurred by members of the government or by persons or groups associated with the government to serve interests manifestly personal -- interests that are unrelated to the interests of the State. Source: http://www.odiousdebts.org/odiousdebts/index.cfm?DSP=subcontentAreaID=163
Re: The concept of corruption
Corruption is defined as the abuse of public power for private gain. === This is way too thin a definition of corruption. It concedes too much to methodological individualism. Ian The definition seems pretty good to me. What's methodological individualism? Joanna Alexander Sack, the author and legal scholar of the doctrine of odious debts, included in his definition of odious debts, loans incurred by members of the government or by persons or groups associated with the government to serve interests manifestly personal -- interests that are unrelated to the interests of the State. Source: http://www.odiousdebts.org/odiousdebts/index.cfm?DSP=subcontentAreaID=163
Re: The concept of corruption
- Original Message - From: joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, November 02, 2003 5:31 PM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] The concept of corruption Corruption is defined as the abuse of public power for private gain. snip The definition seems pretty good to me. What's methodological individualism? Joanna == It makes all politics and commerce corrupt by definition. It also ignores the problematzing of the public-private distinction. Who gets to decide what 'abuse of power' means? http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Scie/ScieFran.htm Ian
Re: The concept of corruption
maybe we should have a rule: no-one is allowed to reject a definition unless they can propose a better one. (Or they must defend the idea that definitions never facilitate thought.) to my mind, if corruption is defined within the context of capitalism (i.e., taking capitalist property norms as given, unquestioned), the abuse of public power for private gain makes sense. Corruption would be something that government (i.e., public) employees may or may not be involved in, usually in conjunction with business. Normal deals between businesses (i.e., commerce) aren't corrupt in this view because they respect capitalist norms of property. Politics that fits with preserving capitalist property-rights would also not be corrupt. So not all commerce and politics would be corrupt. If we don't take capitalist norms for granted, then the _whole system_ is corrupt in that it involves the state enforcement of capitalist exploitation (which benefits private interests). In that case, conventionally-defined corruption could actually be a strike against the system, undermining its stability. Usually not, though. Corrupt politicians just want to _join_ the capitalist class. Jim -Original Message- From: Eubulides [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sun 11/2/2003 5:39 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Subject: Re: [PEN-L] The concept of corruption Corruption is defined as the abuse of public power for private gain. snip The definition seems pretty good to me. What's methodological individualism? Joanna == It makes all politics and commerce corrupt by definition. It also ignores the problematzing of the public-private distinction. Who gets to decide what 'abuse of power' means?
Re: The concept of corruption
There are at least two distinct senses of the term methodological individualism: (1) All social phenomena can be explained in terms of individual persons and their states without reference to social facts or states (the nonreductive sense), and (2) All social phenomena can be explained _only_ in terms of individual persons and their states without reference to social facts or states (the reductive sense), i.e., there are no explanatory social facts or properties. The first view is probabaly false and probaly incoherent because the mental states of individuals are social states at least in part. But it's a harmless view if it is taken to say there is also social analysis. The second view is not only false and meaningless, but pernicious, and incompatible with historical materialism. I wrote a paper on this a decade ago, Metaphysical Individualism and Functional Explanation, Phil Science (1993). jks --- Eubulides [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: - Original Message - From: joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, November 02, 2003 5:31 PM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] The concept of corruption Corruption is defined as the abuse of public power for private gain. snip The definition seems pretty good to me. What's methodological individualism? Joanna == It makes all politics and commerce corrupt by definition. It also ignores the problematzing of the public-private distinction. Who gets to decide what 'abuse of power' means? http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Scie/ScieFran.htm Ian __ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/
Re: The concept of corruption
well, ok. but I still don't get how the definition earns this critique. Joanna andie nachgeborenen wrote: There are at least two distinct senses of the term methodological individualism: (1) All social phenomena can be explained in terms of individual persons and their states without reference to social facts or states (the nonreductive sense), and (2) All social phenomena can be explained _only_ in terms of individual persons and their states without reference to social facts or states (the reductive sense), i.e., there are no explanatory social facts or properties. The first view is probabaly false and probaly incoherent because the mental states of individuals are social states at least in part. But it's a harmless view if it is taken to say there is also social analysis. The second view is not only false and meaningless, but pernicious, and incompatible with historical materialism. I wrote a paper on this a decade ago, Metaphysical Individualism and Functional Explanation, Phil Science (1993). jks --- Eubulides [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: - Original Message - From: joanna bujes [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, November 02, 2003 5:31 PM Subject: Re: [PEN-L] The concept of corruption Corruption is defined as the abuse of public power for private gain. snip The definition seems pretty good to me. What's methodological individualism? Joanna == It makes all politics and commerce corrupt by definition. It also ignores the problematzing of the public-private distinction. Who gets to decide what 'abuse of power' means? http://www.bu.edu/wcp/Papers/Scie/ScieFran.htm Ian __ Do you Yahoo!? Exclusive Video Premiere - Britney Spears http://launch.yahoo.com/promos/britneyspears/
Re: The concept of corruption
- Original Message - From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] If we don't take capitalist norms for granted, then the _whole system_ is corrupt in that it involves the state enforcement of capitalist exploitation (which benefits private interests). In that case, conventionally-defined corruption could actually be a strike against the system, undermining its stability. Usually not, though. Corrupt politicians just want to _join_ the capitalist class. Jim This, of course is precisely what a different definition of corruption would seek to show. I won't even go into the internal problems of the conventional definition provided earlier as that would take a monograph. Corruption is polysemous and surely socialists have a definition/paradigm of analysis of corruption that asserts *the whole system* is corrupt. The question is whether that definition is non-defeasible, as your use of ... intimates. I don't feel the need to be a dictionary every time discussion of terms comes up. After all, pretty much the same charge you leveled at the beginning of your post is leveled against socialists all the time. Ian
More on anti-corruption
The British Statistical Office estimated that fraud accounted for maybe 11 billion British pounds of foreign trade and up to 0.2 percent of GDP. See: http://www.statistics.gov.uk/articles/economic_trends/ETAug03Ruffles.pdf In the industrialised countries, annual crime victim rates are from one in three victims to one in six victims. In Eastern Europe, the incidence of car theft is especially high. In the Third World, one in five people annually are said to be victims of corruption, and the other big sources of crime are consumer fraud and thefts from cars. For some fraud statistics, see http://www.epaynews.com/statistics/fraud.html Anti-corruption information at http://www.nobribes.org/ and www.transparency.org . Transparency International has branches in several countries. For the Global Corruption Report 2003, see http://www.globalcorruptionreport.org/download.shtml For statistics on world crime, see http://www.uncjin.org/Statistics/statistics.html and http://www.unodc.org/unodc/en/crime_cicp_surveys.html A table showing total recorded crime per 100,000 inhabitants per country is shown at http://www.unodc.org/pdf/crime/sixthsurvey/TotalRecordedCrime.pdf The UN anti-corruption treaty text, adopted by consensus but yet to be ratified, spells out measures to prevent corruption in the public and private sectors and requires governments to cooperate in the investigations and prosecutions of offenders. It establishes a commitment to criminalize bribery, embezzlement, and money laundering, and requires that governments take action in a number of areas - for example in public procurement, public financial management, and in regulating their public officials. Politicians and political parties must declare openly how they finance their election campaigns, and countries must return assets obtained through corruption to the country from where they were stolen. Private-sector bribery is not a crime in the United States. We get at it in other ways, said a U.S. official. This is an area quite distant from determining what is proper conduct in the public sector. It would be intruding into purely private-sector conduct. But Jeremy Pope, executive director of Berlin-based Transparency International, argues that business corruption undermines public confidence in the private sector and can have serious economic and political consequences. Source: http://forums.transnationale.org/viewtopic.php?t=1056view=next The new Treaty text complements another landmark treaty, the United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime, which entered into force Sept. 29 and requires ratifying countries to cooperate with each other in combatting money laundering, organized crime and human trafficking. According to a 1998 UN declaration, corruption bribery was defined as a) The offer, promise or giving of any payment, gift or other advantage, directly or indirectly, by any private or public corporation, including a transnational corporation, or individual from a State to any public official or elected representative of another country as undue consideration for performing or refraining from the performance of that official's or representative's duties in connection with an international commercial transaction; (b) The soliciting, demanding, accepting or receiving, directly or indirectly, by any public official or elected representative of a State from any private or public corporation, including a transnational corporation, or individual from another country of any payment, gift or other advantage, as undue consideration for performing or refraining from the performance of that official's or representative's duties in connection with an international commercial transaction. The World Bank claims corruption is the single greatest obstacle to economic and social development. It undermines development by distorting the rule of law and weakening the institutional foundation on which economic growth depends. The harmful effects of corruption are especially severe on the poor, who are hardest hit by economic decline, are most reliant on the provision of public services, and are least capable of paying the extra costs associated with bribery, fraud, and the misappropriation of economic privileges. Corruption sabotages policies and programs that aim to reduce poverty, so attacking corruption is critical to the achievement of the Bank's overarching mission of poverty reduction. The World Bank's proposed strategy has the following elements:1. Increasing Political Accountability 2. Strengthening Civil Society Participation 3. Creating a Competitive Private Sector 4. Institutional Restraints on Power 5. Improving Public Sector Management. Jurriaan
global corruption alive and well
http://www.globalcorruptionreport.org/ Global Corruption Report 2003 covering worldwide corruption from July 2001 to June 2002 [Report available as pdf file] http://www.transparency.org/ [For more info] To this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for originality. There aren't any. [Les Paul]
corruption, openness, growth
[the link to the paper is at the bottom] http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns4247 Free markets can hit economic growth 19:00 08 October 03 Exclusive from New Scientist Print Edition. If developing countries join the global economy too soon, they risk becoming trapped in a cycle of poverty and corruption, a new analysis suggests. A number of empirical studies have shown that poorer countries experience higher levels of corruption. Badly paid officials are easily tempted by bribes, the reasoning goes, while the well paid officials in richer nations risk losing their comfortable salaries if they are caught taking backhanders. But if corruption so bedevils developing nations, how do they escape and become rich? Daniele Paserman, an economist at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel, and his colleagues say they have found a simple answer. If a poor country opens up its economy to the outside world too quickly, the flow of money across its borders encourages corruption, which in turn hampers growth. Bribery and wealth But those countries with closed economies can grow until they can afford to pay their officials well. This runs counter to the conventional wisdom that free markets across borders encourage development and cut corruption. We are highlighting one of the dangers of being more open, says Paserman. But there are other benefits. Paserman's team tested the idea by gathering data on economic output in the late 1990s from 165 countries. They adopted a recently developed index of corruption, which pools the views of various organisations on how corrupt individual countries are. They then classified countries as open, western-style economies or closed economies. To do this they used several criteria, including the strength of each country's black market, which always flourishes in closed economies. In open countries there was a strong link between poverty and corruption, with poor countries far more corrupt than rich ones. But in closed countries they found no correlation (see graphs). The most plausible explanation for this disparity, says Paserman, is that in a closed country, corrupt officials are obliged to spend their ill-gotten gains at home. Even if this money is spent on the black market, it still helps boost the nation's economic growth. But in open nations, corrupt money leaves the country, doing nothing to relieve poverty, so encouraging more corruption. Andrew Simms of the New Economics Foundation, a think tank based in London, UK, says developed countries could take some steps to help developing countries join the global economy. Forcing imported money to be placed within banks for a fixed period would help track dirty money and deter money laundering. Mick Hamer http://micro5.mscc.huji.ac.il/~economics/facultye/paserman/Neeman-Paserman-Simhon_August2003.pdf
Re: WB-corruption
In Johannesburg, we drink water tainted by WB-supported corruption, which included a false promise to fund the investigation and prosecution into Lesotho Highlands Water Project dam-related bribery. A couple of years ago, the Bank even gave a green light to more work by Acres Int'l and Lahmeyer -- two big construction companies since convicted of bribery -- and at least ten others (including the biggie, ABB) are up for prosecution in coming weeks and months. So instead of debarring, the Bank actively sabotaged the attempts to stop the bribery on Africa's largest single project. You can imagine how incredibly difficult it will be when the WB is faced with pressure to debar ABB, it's largest contractor. This is yet another reason for us all to support this excellent campaign: http://www.worldbankbboycott.org If any of you have money in your academic pension fund routed through TIAA-CREF, you'll be happy to know that last week, they officially rid themselves of the last WB bonds on their books. If that is your money they were investing in the Bank, you can proudly say that you no longer profit from global apartheid via the World Bank. Does anybody know if the WB publishes the blacklisted corporations? The list is only ...nearly 100 companies and individuals .. Pathetically short list, but I'd like to see it. Gene Coyle Eubulides wrote: World Bank Focused on Fighting Corruption Graft and Bribery, Once Tolerated, Punished by Blacklisting
WB-corruption
World Bank Focused on Fighting Corruption Graft and Bribery, Once Tolerated, Punished by Blacklisting By Jonathan Finer Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, July 4, 2003; Page E01 Once upon a time, World Bank financiers viewed their mission in narrow terms: Lend money to poor countries to try to make them richer. The governments that borrowed the money might let a bribe determine who was awarded a contract, and money intended for new highways or hospitals was sometimes siphoned off for other purposes, such as buying weapons. But overall, bank officials said, a little bit of corruption was tolerable -- often necessary -- to make economic development work. They don't say that anymore. Responding to evidence that corruption impedes the progress of failing economies, the World Bank in the late 1990s began cracking down on the corrupt practices of its borrowers. The one thing I'm proudest of is our work on corruption, bank President James D. Wolfensohn said recently. Before he took office in 1995, Wolfensohn said, the bank considered corruption an issue of politics, as opposed to one of economic development. Now, it is now central to what we do. Under Wolfensohn, the bank began participating in international efforts to fight corruption. It developed internal controls to audit its projects. It compiled a blacklist of nearly 100 companies and individuals banned from receiving bank-funded contracts because of bribery, theft or for breaking other rules. Since 1996, the bank has started more than 600 anti-corruption programs in nearly 100 countries, according to a published statement. Some observers of the World Bank -- which reported that it lent $19.5 billion of dollars in the year ended June 30, 2002 -- say it should be doing more to discourage the governments and companies it works with from misusing its money, which comes mostly from the governments of rich countries. The bank has continued to fund projects in countries where corruption is said to be rampant, such as Bangladesh. Only one country, Kenya, has been prohibited from receiving bank loans because of its government's corrupt practices, and that was temporary. Despite the blacklist, the bank sometimes has been reluctant to ban companies that violate its rules. Because many of the world's most corrupt countries are also among the poorest, the bank's new stance can force difficult choices between continuing aid to a country that needs it and cutting it to discourage corruption. Poor countries are also notoriously poor record-keepers, making auditing more difficult. No one says this is easy. It's a trade-off, said Peter Eigen, founder and president of Transparency International, a corruption watchdog group. You can't just have a simplistic link between the level of corruption and the level of funding. Some of these countries would really struggle without the bank's loans. Eigen, who left the World Bank in 1991 when his pleas for a stronger anti-corruption stance were ignored, said he believes that under Wolfensohn the bank has made fighting corruption a priority. It's very hard to change a large organization like the World Bank, and they're still working through this, Eigen said. They were pretty bad, and allowed [corruption] to become a major problem. There's been a total change in policy, but to change from policy to total implementation is a long way to go. While I'd be hard pressed to say they've licked it, they are an enthusiastic and effective partner. The U.S. General Accounting Office evaluated the bank's anti-corruption efforts and gave a mixed review in a June report. While it found that the bank had taken important steps toward reducing internal corruption, the agency also recommended further action, including a more extensive audit of whether the bank's loans are used for their intended purposes. The bank has a long way to go, said William Easterly, an economics professor at New York University. If the client is important enough geostrategically or one they want to cultivate in the long run, they will continue lending to them, despite long histories of corruption. They continue forcing loans down that pipe. Corruption can take many forms, but it is usually defined as the misuse of public office or money for private gain. In the 1980s and early 1990s, most academic literature on economic development argued that corruption could help grease the wheels of a fledgling economy. But after several studies showed that corruption impedes development, many foreign aid programs began advocating zero tolerance toward corruption. The World Bank responded to the shifting conventional wisdom. Soon after Wolfensohn railed against the cancer of corruption at the bank's 1996 annual meeting in Hong Kong, the bank formed an investigative body to audit its loans and set up a 24-hour hotline to allow staff and members of the public to report allegations of corruption. In November 1998 the bank convened a sanctions committee to punish companies
Re: WB-corruption
The WB fights retail corruption, not wholesale corruption. -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: WB-corruption
Does anybody know if the WB publishes the blacklisted corporations? The list is only ...nearly 100 companies and individuals .. Pathetically short list, but I'd like to see it. Gene Coyle Eubulides wrote: World Bank Focused on Fighting Corruption Graft and Bribery, Once Tolerated, Punished by Blacklisting By Jonathan Finer Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, July 4, 2003; Page E01 Once upon a time, World Bank financiers viewed their mission in narrow terms: Lend money to poor countries to try to make them richer. The governments that borrowed the money might let a bribe determine who was awarded a contract, and money intended for new highways or hospitals was sometimes siphoned off for other purposes, such as buying weapons. But overall, bank officials said, a little bit of corruption was tolerable -- often necessary -- to make economic development work. They don't say that anymore. Responding to evidence that corruption impedes the progress of failing economies, the World Bank in the late 1990s began cracking down on the corrupt practices of its borrowers. The one thing I'm proudest of is our work on corruption, bank President James D. Wolfensohn said recently. Before he took office in 1995, Wolfensohn said, the bank considered corruption an issue of politics, as opposed to one of economic development. Now, it is now central to what we do. Under Wolfensohn, the bank began participating in international efforts to fight corruption. It developed internal controls to audit its projects. It compiled a blacklist of nearly 100 companies and individuals banned from receiving bank-funded contracts because of bribery, theft or for breaking other rules. Since 1996, the bank has started more than 600 anti-corruption programs in nearly 100 countries, according to a published statement. Some observers of the World Bank -- which reported that it lent $19.5 billion of dollars in the year ended June 30, 2002 -- say it should be doing more to discourage the governments and companies it works with from misusing its money, which comes mostly from the governments of rich countries. The bank has continued to fund projects in countries where corruption is said to be rampant, such as Bangladesh. Only one country, Kenya, has been prohibited from receiving bank loans because of its government's corrupt practices, and that was temporary. Despite the blacklist, the bank sometimes has been reluctant to ban companies that violate its rules. Because many of the world's most corrupt countries are also among the poorest, the bank's new stance can force difficult choices between continuing aid to a country that needs it and cutting it to discourage corruption. Poor countries are also notoriously poor record-keepers, making auditing more difficult. No one says this is easy. It's a trade-off, said Peter Eigen, founder and president of Transparency International, a corruption watchdog group. You can't just have a simplistic link between the level of corruption and the level of funding. Some of these countries would really struggle without the bank's loans. Eigen, who left the World Bank in 1991 when his pleas for a stronger anti-corruption stance were ignored, said he believes that under Wolfensohn the bank has made fighting corruption a priority. It's very hard to change a large organization like the World Bank, and they're still working through this, Eigen said. They were pretty bad, and allowed [corruption] to become a major problem. There's been a total change in policy, but to change from policy to total implementation is a long way to go. While I'd be hard pressed to say they've licked it, they are an enthusiastic and effective partner. The U.S. General Accounting Office evaluated the bank's anti-corruption efforts and gave a mixed review in a June report. While it found that the bank had taken important steps toward reducing internal corruption, the agency also recommended further action, including a more extensive audit of whether the bank's loans are used for their intended purposes. The bank has a long way to go, said William Easterly, an economics professor at New York University. If the client is important enough geostrategically or one they want to cultivate in the long run, they will continue lending to them, despite long histories of corruption. They continue forcing loans down that pipe. Corruption can take many forms, but it is usually defined as the misuse of public office or money for private gain. In the 1980s and early 1990s, most academic literature on economic development argued that corruption could help grease the wheels of a fledgling economy. But after several studies showed that corruption impedes development, many foreign aid programs began advocating zero tolerance toward corruption. The World Bank responded to the shifting conventional wisdom. Soon after Wolfensohn railed against the cancer of corruption at the bank's 1996 annual meeting in Hong Kong, the bank formed an investigative body to audit its
Re: WB-corruption
- Original Message - From: Eugene Coyle [EMAIL PROTECTED] Does anybody know if the WB publishes the blacklisted corporations? The list is only ...nearly 100 companies and individuals .. Pathetically short list, but I'd like to see it. Gene Coyle === Surf's up: http://www1.worldbank.org/publicsector/anticorrupt/
Re: Re: Jazz corruption.
Gil Skillman [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: For what it's worth, I think the original connection went corruption--brothels and speakeasies and underground clubs--jazz and sometimes blues. Right, like I said, New Orleans jazz was whorehouse music to entertain the girls or the customers while waiting. A prominent source of "corruption" was Prohibition, during which jazz was the hot dance music of the day. Well, yes, but the hothouse licensed corruption of the Storyville Red Light District antedates Prohibition, and the corruption of the swing era and swing-to-bop period postdates it. But there is no doubt that the gangsters who thrived off Prohibition muscled their way into music and clubs big time afterwards as well as during. Btw, "hot" jazz was the hot jazz of its day, but there was also sweet jazz of the Paul Whiteman Band variety, mainly done by white performances, that was not hot. Some of it was marvelous. You can't beat Bix Beiderbecke on the horn, unless you're Louis Armstrong. Nowadays corruption has no particular musical connection Oh, yeah? See Hit Men: Power Brokers Fast Money Inside the Music Business.by Fredric Dannen A great read, and really horrifying stories behind the music we love. Makes you long for the days of Al Capone, who after all just wanted his cut. --cf.Providence RI or swingin' Bridgeport, CT. As for rock n roll, well, different clientele. Were he alive today, I suspect Boss Tweed wouldn't be into heavy metal. Hmm. What would BossTweed listen to were he alive today? Sousa or the Sex Pistols? This is an old condundrum about subjunctive conditionals. If Caeser were alive today, he would uise (a) catapults, (b) the MOAB. You pick. jksDo you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Platinum - Watch CBS' NCAA March Madness, live on your desktop!
Jazz corruption.
is there a correlation between corruption and jazz? it makes sense for Chicago and New Orleans... what is the explanation of this correlation, if it exists? why doesn't this correlation work for rock n roll, or does it? did it work for Baroque music, back when Bach was hot? If the mayor stamps out corruption, does that also strike a blow against creative music? enquiring minds want to know... Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine JKS writes: [Kansas City]was one of the crookedest places on the planet, and accordingly a capital of jazz. Charlie Parker hailed from there, had his first gigs in Jay McShann's band.
Re: Jazz corruption.
For what it's worth, I think the original connection went corruption--brothels and speakeasies and underground clubs--jazz and sometimes blues. A prominent source of corruption was Prohibition, during which jazz was the hot dance music of the day. Nowadays corruption has no particular musical connection--cf.Providence RI or swingin' Bridgeport, CT. As for rock n roll, well, different clientele. Were he alive today, I suspect Boss Tweed wouldn't be into heavy metal. Ethnomusicologically, Gil is there a correlation between corruption and jazz? it makes sense for Chicago and New Orleans... what is the explanation of this correlation, if it exists? why doesn't this correlation work for rock n roll, or does it? did it work for Baroque music, back when Bach was hot? If the mayor stamps out corruption, does that also strike a blow against creative music? enquiring minds want to know... Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevinehttp://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine JKS writes: [Kansas City] was one of the crookedest places on the planet, and accordingly a capital of jazz. Charlie Parker hailed from there, had his first gigs in Jay McShann's band.
Re: Jazz corruption.
Jazz and corruption: Jazz (the term is old slang for sex, as in "jazz me baby") was originally New Orleans whorehouse music, based in the "protected" red light district of Storyville, shut down in an abortive effort at protective the morals of servicemen in WWII, thus distributing the music all over the place, including Chicago, where it served a similae purpose in the 1920s under Al Capone; of course KC (in the 30s); LA (in the 40s and 50s), NY (20s on), all crooked towns. jks "Devine, James" [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: is there a correlation between corruption and jazz? it makes sense for Chicago and New Orleans... what is the explanation of this correlation, if it exists? why doesn't this correlation work for rock n roll, or does it? did it work for Baroque music, back when Bach was hot? If the mayor stamps out corruption, does that also strike a blow against creative music? enquiring minds want to know... Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine JKS writes: [Kansas City]was one of the crookedest places on the planet, and accordingly a capital of jazz. Charlie Parker hailed from there, had his first gigs in Jay McShann's band.Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Platinum - Watch CBS' NCAA March Madness, live on your desktop!
Re: oil, corruption, rents and all that...........
[New York Times] January 21, 2003 Corruption and Waste Bleed Mexico's Oil Lifeline By TIM WEINER CADEREYTA, Mexico - Tony Cantu grew up with the giant oil refinery that Pemex, Mexico's state-owned oil company, runs here in his hometown. He helped build it and operate it, rising from construction worker to computer programmer to chemical engineer. Mr. Cantu gave Pemex a decade of his working life. But he will never work there again. He can explain why in one word. Corruption, he said, gazing at the refinery, 20 miles outside Monterrey in northern Mexico. People being stepped on, forced to be corrupt - I hated that. There were a lot of things you had to shut up about. The bosses would kill to protect themselves. People were subjugated by fear. For more than 60 years, Pemex, the world's fifth-largest oil company, has been Mexico's economic lifeblood. A $50 billion-a-year enterprise, it controls every gas pump in Mexico, and it sells nearly as much oil to the United States as Saudi Arabia does. Today, with some oil producers like Iraq and Venezuela facing nation-shaking crises, Mexico looks like a sure and steady source of oil. The United States may be tempted to rely on it even more. But Pemex is in danger of breaking down. Financially, we are falling, its director, Raúl Muñoz Leos, said in an interview. Nearly every peso of Pemex's profits goes to run the government of Mexico. The company, after paying taxes and royalties, actually lost $3.5 billion in in 2001. Without major restructuring or tens of billions of dollars in foreign investment, Mr. Muñoz Leos warned recently, We would face, in the short term, a collapse. One reason is a rottenness at Pemex's core. The company loses at least $1 billion a year to corruption, its executives say, in a continuous corrosion of the machine that keeps Mexico solvent. Fixing Pemex is as crucial to Mexico's future as it is to American oil supplies. When Vicente Fox became president two years ago after defeating the political machine that ran Mexico for 71 years - the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or PRI - he vowed to make his country more open and democratic and to make Pemex run like a 21st-century corporation. To change Mexico, Mr. Fox must first change Pemex. It has been a cash machine for the government, a slush fund for politicians and a patronage mill for party loyalists since the party created Petróleos Mexicanos, or Pemex, in 1938. After nationalizing American and British oil interests, the party promptly changed the Constitution to bar foreign investment in underground oil and gas. It was a declaration of independence: Expropriation Day is still celebrated each year. Even today, the PRI, which still holds a plurality in Congress, is fighting changes to the Constitution and at the oil giant it created, in part on grounds of patriotism. President Fox's attempts at reform have been hamstrung by PRI resistance - and Pemex's history of corruption. Pemex's last director, Rogelio Montemayor, a former PRI governor, and its union boss, Carlos Romero Deschamps, a PRI senator, each stand accused of stealing tens of millions of dollars from Pemex for the PRI's 2000 presidential campaign against Mr. Fox. Both men deny the charges. Mr. Romero Deschamps is battling an attempt in Congress to strip him of the legal immunity he enjoys as a sitting senator. Mr. Montemayor fled Mexico last year and is fighting extradition from Houston. The PRI, struggling to defend them - and itself, is also resisting every effort to transform Pemex. The political will needed to reform Pemex has just not coalesced, said Eduardo Cepeda, the head of J. P. Morgan Chase's Mexico office. Edward L. Morse, executive adviser at Hess Energy Trading Co. and former publisher of Petroleum Intelligence Weekly, said by telephone from New York that the effort to reform the beast had failed. President Fox, he said, does not understand how thoroughly ingrained in the national political culture the monopoly of Pemex is. Pemex remains one of the world's few national oil companies with no competition from within or without. Its resulting inefficiencies are stark. Othón Canales Treviño is Pemex's director for competitiveness and innovation - the man in charge of creating the new Pemex. He once ran a company that supplied Pemex with chemicals, and he was often solicited for bribes, he said. Today he sits on a commission on corruption at Pemex, composed of 14 directors. There is corruption, he said. But I think the inefficiency is worse. There is brutal inefficiency. For example, Mr. Canales said, he recently asked how much Pemex paid each year for goods and services - everything for ice packs to helicopters rented to fly engineers to offshore rigs. No one knew. It took four months to come up with the answer - $7 billion. We want to act like a company, he said. Pemex isn't a company. It isn't Pemex Inc. We're not a government ministry either. We are - something weird. Our behavior changes
Corruption, pollution and the US
The times has an article describing a study in which Finland is First, and U.S. 51st, in Environmental Health. Cuba is also ahead of the US. Corruption is a major factor in determining pollution. Nonetheless, the descrition does not make the study seem to solid. http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/02/science/02ENVI.html?ex=1013670932ei=1en=420884fcf3650311 -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
the econophysics of corruption
http://www.nature.com/nsu/020121/020121-14.html Sample of hilarity: For a social economy, there is a threshold average wealth above which Pareto's law collapses and one person can garner a significant proportion of the total wealth. Burda's team calls this a physical mechanism for corruption. Below the threshold, money distribution follows the power law. For a liberal economy, on the other hand, this threshold is infinite. So corruption, theoretically speaking, does not occur. Ian
Global Crime, Corruption, and Accountability
http://www.epiic.com/archives/1999/syllabus99.html
Re: unemployment corruption
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I can't remember any details, but Michael Vickery had a discussion of this topic in a book on Cambodia in which I thought he did a good job of deflating the KR's pretensions to being socialists. I haven't read it in many years, though. There's a new edition of Vickery's book out. The best book on that period in Cambodia. Vickery argues that DK was closest to what Marx,at times, called an "asiatic mode of production." Sam Pawlett
unemployment corruption
[was: Re: [PEN-L:3001] Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Memory History: Herman Melville's _Benito Cereno_ (was Re: Yugoslavia to fSU and Chile)] I wrote: Do you believe that state ownership automatically creates [full employment]? It's not true in Algeria, for example, where the state ownership of the oil industry coexists with high unemployment... Also, even in the old USSR, where low unemployment was the rule, political deviants found that they had a hard time getting a job. Please correct me if I am wrong about this. Louis writes: I am talking about state ownership in countries that have had socialist revolutions. Algeria did not. The right to a job was one of the central features of the Soviet economy, as it was in China until recently (Iron Rice Bowl). I would credit the "iron rice bowl" and "the right to a job" not to state ownership of property but to the fact that the peasants and/or workers were actively involved in the revolution and thus kept a lot of power in society for a long time (though this power decayed). State property is a necessary condition to allow these rules, but is not sufficient. In the case of the USSR, the "right to a job" eventually reflected not working-class power as much the dynamics that Kornai and others pointed to: the planning system created an incentive to hoard all inputs, including labor-power. Factory managers had to have enough labor-power available to try to live up to the unreasonable demands of the central plan. This in turn allowed the working class to escape the kind of powerlessness that arises from the normality of unemployment (seen under capitalism) but not enough power to control the state. BTW, did the right to a job apply to Jehovah's Witnesses? or did they have to stay "in the closet" to keep a job? That is, am I right to say that "even in the old USSR, where low unemployment was the rule, political deviants found that they had a hard time getting a job"? If you want to know how important it was and how antithetical it was to an "efficient" economy, I would refer you to Alec Nove's "Toward a Feasible Socialism". Workers are not "productive" unless you have the lash of unemployment threatening them. Capitalism's "solution" (using the reserve army of the unemployed to motivate workers) is quite inefficient, while the official standards of "efficiency" applied in the media and by many economists basically refer to profit maximization, not true efficiency. (Capitalism sacrifices efficiency to preserve profits, just as the Soviet-type planned economy sacrificed efficiency to preserve bureaucratic rule.) As you should know from reading my messages to pen-l, I don't agree with Nove, even though I've never singled him out by name. In many cases, as Kornai argues, Soviet workers had jobs (and so weren't openly unemployed) but didn't do much work, since there was little incentive to do so... Efficiency is a different topic altogether. I am much more concerned about beggary, prostitution, hunger and disease than I am about efficiency ... You should know that if an economy is wasting less of its resources, it has more resources available to deal with beggary, prostitution, hunger, and disease. The fact that it does not do so reflects _class power_: the capitalists don't want to solve these problems unless (1) they start spreading to their number, as when diseases from the slums start hitting the "good side of town" (cf. Engels on Manchester) and/or (2) people start organizing to push those in power to care about these problems. In a separate thread (on privatization), I wrote that the ruling strata in countries with state-owned means of production fight like hell to preserve that power. Second, there's the specific kind of corruption I was talking about, the use of collectively-owned assets for private gain. Now, I don't know the facts of the matter, but Milosevic's colleagues have been accused regularly of exactly that. Louis writes: Of course there was corruption. Milosevic's resignation speech openly admits that. "Time spent in opposition helps a party rid itself of those who joined it for personal gain while it was in power." If even Milosevic admits the existence of corruption, then it _must_ exist! So you think that this corruption was one factor that encouraged his recent expulsion from the presidency of the FRY? Or was the corruption itself the result of US/NATO's efforts? However, corruption in a postcapitalist society is a lesser evil to unemployment in a capitalist society. People did not die of corruption under Brezhnev, they die now for lack of food or medicine in Putin's free economy. I find it very hard to make comparisons like this. Some bozo might say "but what if 1917 had never happened? then we should compare a country that was capitalist all along to
Re: Re: unemployment corruption
This discussion is getting very repetitive, so I shortened it. I wrote: More importantly, I don't see why anyone has to choose between Brezhnev and Putin. Why can't we reject both? Louis responds: Because postcapitalist economies function like trade unions--they offer working people protection against the ravages of the free market. Not all of them do. Look at Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea, which replaced one ravage for another. No matter how many the Khmer Rouge killed, it's more than in the average capitalist country. I would choose Jimmy Hoffa against a break-up of the Teamsters at the hands of the FBI. Is this the only choice? what about if the TDU were to really take control? To repeat myself (again!), the problem with the corrupt "trade unions" that ruled Eastern Europe is that they undermined their own popular support, making them prone to overthrow, from within and without. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Re: Re: unemployment corruption
Jim Devine: Not all of them do. Look at Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea, which replaced one ravage for another. No matter how many the Khmer Rouge killed, it's more than in the average capitalist country. No socialist revolution here. Is this the only choice? what about if the TDU were to really take control? TDU, sure. Good. To repeat myself (again!), the problem with the corrupt "trade unions" that ruled Eastern Europe is that they undermined their own popular support, making them prone to overthrow, from within and without. Okay. Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
Re: Re: Re: Re: unemployment corruption
I wrote: Not all of them do. Look at Pol Pot's Democratic Kampuchea, which replaced one ravage for another. No matter how many the Khmer Rouge killed, it's more than in the average capitalist country. Louis writes: No socialist revolution here. why not? it sure seems to fit the standard definition: peasants take power (under the leadership of a party that is organized along "Leninist" lines, i.e., as a top-down hierarchy of the sort that became popular under Stalin) and the state takes over the means of production. Was it non-socialist because the Khmer Rouge had an incorrect line? a wrong program? because its leadership dabbled in French structuralism? It seems to me a clear case of bad socialism (though it shouldn't be used to say anything about socialism in general). Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: unemployment corruption
Jim Devine: why not? it sure seems to fit the standard definition: peasants take power (under the leadership of a party that is organized along "Leninist" lines, i.e., as a top-down hierarchy of the sort that became popular under Stalin) and the state takes over the means of production. Sorry, Jim. If I am going to discuss Cambodia, it will be on the same basis that I discuss anything in depth. I will have to spend time in the Columbia library and really dig in. I don't think you have the time nor the inclination to keep up your side of the debate, so I will let things drop right here. Louis Proyect Marxism mailing list: http://www.marxmail.org/
Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: unemployment corruption
In a message dated 10/11/00 6:08:25 PM Eastern Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: It seems to me a clear case of bad socialism (though it shouldn't be used to say anything about socialism in general). I can't remember any details, but Michael Vickery had a discussion of this topic in a book on Cambodia in which I thought he did a good job of deflating the KR's pretensions to being socialists. I haven't read it in many years, though. --jks
Re: corruption
For one thing, the monied interests are constantly buying influence from politicians in legal ways. Money is the life blood of politics. The vast majority of politicians are influence peddlars in the first place. Take campaign financing in the U.S. So, a lot of times no doubt the line between legal and illegal bribery gets fuzzy or just forgotten. "Corruption" is standard operating procedure in bourgeois democracy. Some corruption is legal and some isn't. Sometimes the corruption gets exposed for various reasons, but it is almost always there, whether exposed or not. CB Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] 01/21/00 05:28PM what do you folks think about the corruption of the Christian Democrats in Germany? To me it links up with similar corruption of CDs in Italy and Japan. In all three, the corrupt CDs were part of the US coalition against the USSR, with corruption often involving CIA-type funds. With the end of the Cold War, this corruption came to light, as it was no longer in the coalition's interest to cover it up. I'm not saying that CDs are necessarily worse than say, social democrats. After all, the economist Papandreou became a corrupt PM of Greece. Of course, there's nothing necessarily corrupt about politicians. In the private sector, they call it "business as usual." Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://clawww.lmu.edu/~JDevine
[PEN-L:10309] Corruption in Russia
[Apologies for the poor formatting. Articles like this appear everyday on JRL] --SP. Johnson's Russia List #3456 22 August 1999 [EMAIL PROTECTED] *** #4 New York Times August 22, 1999 [for personal use only] Russian Money-Laundering Investigation Finds Familiar Swiss Banker in the By TIMOTHY L. O'BRIEN with RAYMOND BONNER At the intersection of illicit Russian money and the Bank of New York is Bruce Rappaport, a Swiss banker who has had brushes with governmental investigators in the past and who has long had an important connection to the bank. Together with the Bank of New York, Rappaport owns a bank in Switzerland that helped provide the American bank with important business contacts in Russia, according to Western bankers familiar with the operation. And millions of dollars that were channeled through the Swiss bank, known as Bank of New York-Inter Maritime, are linked to what Federal investigators describe as possibly one of the biggest money-laundering schemes in the United States, according to a person close to the investigation. The Bank of New York, which for years aggressively sought business in Russia, is currently engulfed in a Federal money-laundering investigation that led to the suspension last week of two senior officers who oversaw the bank's Russian business. Federal investigators are also looking into the activities of their husbands, both of whom are involved in businesses that have ties to either Rappaport or his Swiss bank. The money moving through the Bank of New York-Inter Maritime raises the question of why the Bank of New York, a conservative institution that is one of the nation's oldest banks, worked closely with a man who has frequently drawn the attention of government regulators and law-enforcement officials worldwide. Most recently, Rappaport's bank was sued by the Justice Department in 1997, to recover proceeds that the Government asserted were from drug sales that had been deposited in the Bank of New York-Inter Maritime on the Caribbean island of Antigua by a known money-launderer. A Federal judge dismissed the case last year, though, citing lack of jurisdiction. The Government is appealing the decision. A Boston lawyer representing Bank of New York-Inter Maritime, William Shaw McDermott, did not respond to requests to interview Rappaport or talk about the Justice Department suit. Efforts to contact Rappaport were unsuccessful. The Bank of New York, which is cooperating with the Federal money-laundering investigation, declined to comment about Rappaport. The interest of investigators is heightened, one official said, because Rappaport, who is 76 years old and lives in Switzerland, was recently appointed Antigua's Ambassador to Russia. Antigua, this official noted, has been a major center of Russian money-laundering for many years. Rappaport has long had close business, banking and political ties to Antigua, where the Government once granted him a near-monopoly on the fuel-oil market. Money-laundering is a legal catch-phrase that refers to the criminal practice of taking ill-gotten gains and moving them through a sequence of bank accounts so that they ultimately look like legitimate profits from legal businesses. The money is then withdrawn and used for further criminal activity. Rappaport, who has never been convicted of any wrongdoing, is well known in Russian banking circles. He helped solicit business during the boom times in Moscow. In fact, for a brief time, Bank of New York Inter-Maritime was used in 1994 by the Bank of New York to conduct business in Russia. The world of international banking is often built on personal relationships. In that world, an ability to deal easily across borders and within business, political and financial circles is highly valuable to big banks. To gain access to certain foreign markets, the Bank of New York has relied on people like Rappaport. Born in Haifa, now Israel, Rappaport has used his base in Geneva to pursue investments and business in a wide range of places, including Oman, Liberia, Nigeria, Haiti, Thailand, Indonesia, Belgium and the United States. Rappaport opened Inter-Maritime in Geneva in 1966. By the 1980's, he was one of the Bank of New York's largest individual shareholders, controlling millions of dollars in stock amounting to a nearly 8 percent stake in the company. Although virtually all of that stock has been sold, back in the 80's, Rappaport's hefty stake gave him entre to the bank's senior management, including the chief executive at that time, Carter Bacot. Bacot, whom the Bank of New York declined to make available for comment, is said by a former Bank of New York senior executive to have approved the bank's decision to buy a large stake in Rappaport's bank known then as Inter Maritime. By 1992, the Bank of New York reportedly owned about 28 percent of what became known as Bank of New York-Inter Maritime. In the
[PEN-L:9237] Corruption of a Chinese scientist?
Since 1998, the writer of the following article is one my partners in a financial trading company we started. I think you may enjoy reading the article. Several decades ago, I left the practice of architecture and urban planning under similar circumstances with similar results. Our private group have more than 50 partners like this writer with several new companies in the financial sector, and we are already an independent force now and fully expect to make some big noises within a very few years. We are all socialists by inclination and oppose the ill effects of globalization. Yet we are undeniably active players, albeit reluctant ones, in the globalized finance game. Life is complex, most of us cannot wait for the revolution before we make something of our lives. We are not heroes and certainly no revolutionaries. We are just doing the best we can with what we have - our brains, in a system we don particularly approve. All of us came to America as students, with hardly a penny in our pockets and some with student loans to pay back. We have pledged a good portion of our profit toward progressive causes we support. Henry C.K. Liu DRAGON SLAYER WENT TO THE STREET --My experience in joining the financial industry By B. Perfected in the art of dragon slaying, he started teaching how to slay dragons.. --A cartoon at the NYU Physics Department When a business school faculty member quits academia to join a Wall Street firm, they say He went to the street. It implies that he leaves the safe haven for the jungle of the merciless world. Not without envy, everyone expects him to make a large fortune, though, at the cost of a scholar's soul. Traditionally a person who had gone through the long and arduous way to attain the Ph. D. in theoretical physics had only one destiny: becoming nothing but a professor of physics. All branches of natural sciences culminated in the first half of this century as the first atomic bomb vaporised Hiroshima, television sets crept into the living rooms of the ordinary men, and Neal Armstrong stepped down to the surface of the moon. By the 1990s, it seems that most important and doable things have been done in theoretical physics. The remaining problems are either too difficult, or simply tedious and uninteresting. Like the dragon slayer in the cartoon on the corkboard of the physics department coffee room, I did not find any significant dragons to slay. I went to the street in 1993 after being a postdoctoral research scientist for a year at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University. The inspiration came from a few friends and fellow physics graduates who went on to business schools for another Ph.D. in finance. At that time a few former physicists already landed on jobs with famous Wall Street firms. The rumour said some of them were making over a hundred thousand dollars for the first year. It sent shockwaves among the fellow scientists and graduate students. In parties and coffee rooms, I started to hear about talks of options, stock trades, and Wall Street anecdotes. With scepticism I bought the famous book by Professor John C. Hull, Futures, Options, and Other Derivative Securities. My friend at the Stern School of NYU recommended it to me and said that the book was regarded the Bible of Wall Street. To my amazement, the content was quite interesting. It was all about models and formulas that made a lot of sense. I even wondered that I could have discovered the Black and Scholes formula myself if I had had been in finance. For a glimpse at the culture and throat-cutting warfare of the street, I started to read those once best-selling books such as Liars Poker, Money Culture, Thieves at the Den, and Barbarians at the Gate. They absorbed me in a similar way as did the God Father. Then I was ready to try out my lucks. A friend at Prudential Securities gave me a list of eight headhunters and I started sending out resumes. Five of them promptly called and asked me to pay a visit to their offices. In about a month's time, a nice lady headhunter arranged an interview for me with JP Morgan's derivatives research group. In the morning she gave me a final check-up phone call before the interview. Be confident, she said, From now on you will never worry about money again. The JP Morgan building on 60 Wall Street looked serious and intimidating. The guy who received me was very nice. His business card showed his title as Vice President. I was truly shocked. Am I really this important?, I thought. Then I was brain stormed by six interviewers each talked about 20 minutes with me. Three of them asked me game-like questions such as What is the minimum number of times you have to use a balance to find out a fake coin among eight other identical looking real ones?, What is the optimal stopping strategy for getting the highest expected score if you are
[PEN-L:7830] China Cracks Down on Corruption
Report: Former Beijing Police Chief Held Over Smuggling Probe HONG KONG, Jun 8, 1999 -- (Agence France Presse) Beijing's ex-police chief has been detained as part of investigations into corruption charges against a former Chinese deputy public security minister, a Hong Kong newspaper reported Tuesday. Zhang Liangji, fired in March as head of Beijing's public security bureau, was taken into custody by the communist party's Central Commission for Discipline Inspection, the independent Sing Tao Daily said. It said Zhang was held to assist investigations into smuggling charges against detained former deputy public security minister Li Jizhou, as well as into unpaid loans made to Zhang's son, who died in a shopping mall fire in Beijing last year. Earlier reports said Li, detained since December, allegedly used his position to issue more than 70,000 registration plates for vehicles smuggled into the country. China launched a nationwide anti-smuggling campaign last year. President Jiang Zemin targeted the chronic problem of goods moving in and out of the country without customs clearance, helped by profiteering civilian and army officials. High duties and tariffs on certain goods have promoted a lucrative smuggling industry -- both for the smugglers and the officials who protect them in return for kickbacks. ((c) 1999 Agence France Presse)
[PEN-L:4072] Re: Capitalism Corruption
Blair defines capitalism as the appropriation of surplus value. The only way this is true is by tautology: all other forms of "surplus production" are not surplus value -- only under captalism are forms of surplus production surplus value, therefore... etc. etc. Consider what all of us might agree is really a socialist social formation: a democratically controlled industrial system where the social surplus is allocated democratically. What workers produce over and above what is necessary to replace her/himself with two equally qualified/satisfied adult children over her/his working life and what is necessary to replace all equipment over the same period would be allocated in part to the worker and in part to the rest of society. Now --- is that "appropriation" of surplus value: if the word means "taking against one's will" one might argue "no" because of the democratic control of decision-making. Yet even in that circumstance, the MINORITY's "surplus" will be appropriated by the majority. Yet this would be socialism. I would go further and argue that all class societies which utilize markets involve the appropriation of surplus value --- the slave mode of production in the American South is a perfect example of that situation. Capitalism (IMHO) is a particular form of the expropriation of surplus value. Surely, the situation under Stalinist Central Planning created some kind of class society --- but I am loath to call it capitalist. For one thing, I don't think it had the same kind of dynamics --- particularly in the form of imperialism it adopted (in my opinion, Soviet imperialism after World War II was quite defensive in nature --- not to the people it oppressed but in terms of strategy). I would have a hard time seeing any "exploitation" motivation for Soviet expansionism -- in terms of aid to Cuba, Africa, Vietnam, etc. (whereas the motivation for the US in many of the Cold War episodes were so blatantly exploitative as to be beyond question --- except for most US intellectuals!). Cheers, Mike -- Mike Meeropol Economics Department Cultures Past and Present Program Western New England College Springfield, Massachusetts "Don't blame us, we voted for George McGovern!" Unrepentent Leftist!! [EMAIL PROTECTED] [if at bitnet node: in%"[EMAIL PROTECTED]" but that's fading fast!]
[PEN-L:4092] Re: Capitalism Corruption
Mike wrote: Blair defines capitalism as the appropriation of surplus value. The only way this is true is by tautology: all other forms of "surplus production" are not surplus value -- only under captalism are forms of surplus production surplus value, therefore... etc. etc. Consider what all of us might agree is really a socialist social formation: a democratically controlled industrial system where the social surplus is allocated democratically. What workers produce over and above what is necessary to replace her/himself with two equally qualified/satisfied adult children over her/his working life and what is necessary to replace all equipment over the same period would be allocated in part to the worker and in part to the rest of society. Now --- is that "appropriation" of surplus value: if the word means "taking against one's will" one might argue "no" because of the democratic control of decision-making. Yet even in that circumstance, the MINORITY's "surplus" will be appropriated by the majority. Yet this would be socialism. you have to put in the adjective alienated before the appropriation i think. workers in socialism would be exploited and their surplus appropriated. the fact is that if htey choose to do it then they are not alienated. in a simple two sector model of socialism - consumption goods and capital goods, the workers in the consumption goods sector have to be exploited in order that food is available to the capital goods workers. you can't eat machines. kind regards bill -- ##William F. Mitchell ### Head of Economics Department # University of Newcastle New South Wales, Australia ###*E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] ### Phone: +61 49 215065 # ## ### +61 49 215027 Fax: +61 49 216919 ## WWW Home Page: http://econ-www.newcastle.edu.au/~bill/billyhp.html
[PEN-L:4102] Re: Capitalism Corruption
At 7:48 AM 5/2/96, Mike Meeropol wrote: Blair defines capitalism as the appropriation of surplus value. The only way this is true is by tautology: all other forms of "surplus production" are not surplus value -- only under captalism are forms of surplus production surplus value, therefore... etc. etc. Consider what all of us might agree is really a socialist social formation: a democratically controlled industrial system where the social surplus is allocated democratically. What workers produce over and above what is necessary to replace her/himself with two equally qualified/satisfied adult children over her/his working life and what is necessary to replace all equipment over the same period would be allocated in part to the worker and in part to the rest of society. Now --- is that "appropriation" of surplus value: if the word means "taking against one's will" one might argue "no" because of the democratic control of decision-making. Yet even in that circumstance, the MINORITY's "surplus" will be appropriated by the majority. Yet this would be socialism. I was sloppy. I should have said capitalism is a social formation in which the dominant form of organization of production is capitalist class processes, i.e. the appropriation of sv. What dominant means of course is open to interpretation and disagreement. But this at least permits theorization of multiple class processes and their articulation, which is what Mike addresses but in my opinion does not resolve, below. I would go further and argue that all class societies which utilize markets involve the appropriation of surplus value --- the slave mode of production in the American South is a perfect example of that situation. Capitalism (IMHO) is a particular form of the expropriation of surplus value. Notice the tautology in Mike's formulation: "a democratically controlled industrial system where the social surplus is allocated democratically." People often use the word "democracy" as if its meaning was somehow resolved, not a locus of intense struggle. No, "appropriation" does not mean "taking against one's will": I define communist class processes as the collective self-appropriation of surplus labor. This might mean in practice against the will of some, by the will of others, etc. The relationship is not predetermined a priori. I don't think my definition is any more or less tautological or problematic than Mike's. But it is apparently different. Several articles by Resnick and Wolff in RETHINKING MARXISM over the past few years address the question of class exploitation in the Soviet Union. In struggle and solidarity, Blair Sandler [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[PEN-L:4047] Re: Capitalism Corruption
WARNING: I am responding to part of a post from S. Tell. SHAWGI TELL wrote: -- lots of stuff deleted -- In terms of establishing an economic and political system to serve the interests of the people, there is rich experience from the twentieth century. The only system which had no crisis was socialism, established in the Soviet Union during the period of 1926-27 to the time J.V. Stalin died in 1953. Nikita Khrushchev introduced elements into the socialist system which were to enable the new bourgeoisie to rise from the bureaucracy and the overthrown exploiting classes. Charles Bettleheim's _Class Struggles in the USSR_ and E.H. Carr's mammoth _A History of Soviet Russia_ gives the lie to this absurd dichotomy which argues that Lenin and Stalin established "socialism" and from Khrushchev through Gorbachev the "misleaders" established "capitalism." Until the re-creation of private ownership of the means of production (not control by a factory manager but actual ownership) in the former Soviet Union whatever social formation existed in that country it was not capitalism. In addition, the development of a "non-socialist" social formation which called itself socialist began VERY EARLY --- and the process of Stalinist central plannng and Stalinist anti-democratic bureaucracy was in many respects the antithesis of socialism. Without power emanating from the people with _real teeth_ in the unions and peasant cooperatives and political organizations sufficient to check centralized power, our 20-29 hindsight permits us to recognize that socialism as the antithesis of capitalism was NEVER created in the former Soviet Union. Perhaps at certain times people were actually TRYING to do it, but by the time Stalin had visited his anti-democratic authoritarianism on the Soviet people, cynicism, careerism and self-protection became the rule all through the country. Roy Medvedev's _Let History Judge_ is probably as good an internal critique of Stalinism (by a professed socialist and Marxist I might add) as I've heard of, but I'm sure there are plenty of people on the list who could provide us with sufficient bibliography to refute the absurd statement that I've quoted above. Normally I ignore stuff like this ... but there are certain FACTS of history that have to be understood and acknowledged. At least ... IMHO. Sorry to those who took the trouble to read this for taking up so much space/time. Mike -- Mike Meeropol Economics Department Cultures Past and Present Program Western New England College Springfield, Massachusetts "Don't blame us, we voted for George McGovern!" Unrepentent Leftist!! [EMAIL PROTECTED] [if at bitnet node: in%"[EMAIL PROTECTED]" but that's fading fast!]
[PEN-L:4065] Re: Capitalism Corruption
At 6:40 AM 5/1/96, Mike Meeropol wrote: Charles Bettleheim's _Class Struggles in the USSR_ and E.H. Carr's mammoth _A History of Soviet Russia_ gives the lie to this absurd dichotomy which argues that Lenin and Stalin established "socialism" and from Khrushchev through Gorbachev the "misleaders" established "capitalism." Until the re-creation of private ownership of the means of production (not control by a factory manager but actual ownership) in the former Soviet Union whatever social formation existed in that country it was not capitalism. I agree with Mike's first paragraph above and his other (omitted) comments to the effect that SU under Stalin was neither democratic nor socialist, but I disagree with the second paragraph. *Private* ownership of the means of production is clearly a condition of *certain* forms of capitalism, but it does not *define* capitalism. That is defined as the appropriation of surplus value, which does not necessarily require private ownership if certain other conditions exist. Blair Sandler [EMAIL PROTECTED]
