the AFL should stop attacking and learn something (diana barahona, october 2005):
For 40 years the historically dominant Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV) had an undemocratic structure and union bureaucrats collaborated with management to quash the struggles of rank-and-file workers. Democratic union activists were fired and even murdered while union bosses looked the other way. Now Venezuela has a new union federation. After the leadership of the CTV joined the business federation to support the 2002 military coup and then led a 63-day economic stoppage to force Chavez's resignation, pro-Chavez labor leaders founded the National Workers' Union (UNT) in April of 2003.
(...) There are an estimated 1.2 million workers affiliated with the UNT, which is the same number the CTV counted in its ranks in 2001. The CTV now has 200,000 workers according to one source.
(...) [attributes it to Chavez] Workers seized the opportunity which presented itself and have both supported Chavez and taken advantage of freedom to organize they never had before, supported by a two-year-old prohibition against laying off low-wage workers.
(...) The CTV was historically aligned with one of the two political parties that ruled Venezuela for 40 years, Democratic Action. Presidents of the CTV were party activists and corruption and cronyism were the order of the day.
(...) Asked about the CTV's loyalties, Linares said, "Initially, yes, it had class consciousness, but over time they became bureaucratic and it disappeared. As a matter of fact, there is a very important fact: you won't find a strike--go to the files of the ILO, where they were very well represented ... and there isn't one legal strike recorded in Venezuela during 40 years at the ILO. And we know that there were strikes. Here there were people injured, there were killings, there were confrontations with the police, with the national guard. The private sector guilds fought for their rights, for money, for pay; they fought for all those kinds of demands. But it wasn't recorded. Why? Because the CTV had to show the world that this was paradise."
(...) The AFL-CIO's American Institute for Free Labor Development, a cold war CIA front, had worked closely with the CTV in the early 1960s to purge it of communists at the same time that the Communist Party was decertified politically.
(...) In 1997, after over a decade of neoliberalism had impoverished the country, the CTV made an agreement with the rightist government of Rafael Caldera whereby it accepted a "reform" of the labor code.
(...) [important: question of the universality of unions, especially critical when the CTV claims autonomy] Two seminal events define modern Venezuelan history: the April 2002 military coup, which lasted 48 hours, and the December 2002-January 2003 economic sabotage, also known as the oil coup. Led by its president, Carlos Ortega, the CTV was a key protagonist of both actions, but rank-and-file workers were never consulted by the union leadership. In any event the rate of unionization in Venezuela has historically been very low: 14 percent of the formal sector comprising companies with five or more employees. So when the coup was reversed by uprisings in the military barracks but also the presence of masses of people in the streets around the presidential palace, workers were among those in the streets demanding the return of Chavez, though not as unions. In fact Linares says the only union that responded as such to restore Chavez to the presidency was his fledgling Passenger Transportation Workers Guild.
(...) In that lapse the CTV, again allied with the ruling class, plunged the country into the devastating oil stoppage which cost hundreds of thousands of jobs and more than $10 billion in economic losses, as oil production was cut from 3.1 million barrels a day to 25,000 barrels. Of the state oil company's (PdVSA) 35,000 permanent employees, 18,000 walked off the job.
(...) [post-oilstoppage, new federation founded] After the oil stoppage was defeated, everyone in the Bolivarian Workers' Force was convinced the time had come for a new federation, and on April 5, 2003, they formed the UNT.
(...) This year's May Day parades provided a graphic picture of the decline of the CTV. There were around half a million supporters at the UNT march while not even 1,000 marched with the CTV.
(...) On the labor front, Golinger documented more than $776,000 in different grants that the Solidarity Center received from the NED specifically to support the CTV between February 2001 and March 2002. The ACILS got another CTV support grant for $116,000 in September 2002, five months after the coup and three months before the oil stoppage. In his history of AIFLD (www.laboreducator.org/darkpast.htm) labor activist Harry Kelber says the grants continued in the same amount every three months until at least March 2004. According to Golinger, the ACILS continues to receive grants in excess of $100,000 annually for its work with the CTV. (http://www.venezuelafoia.info/acils.html)
(...) [very interesting discussion with respect to question of autonomy, and politics] Regarding the oil coup at the end of 2002, the ACILS did not fund the shutdown, although Gacek defends it as a legal collective action. He also points to the fact that 20,000 (actually less than 19,000) of a total 35,000 employees were terminated to imply that the action affected the rank-and-file and was anti-labor, and the CTV has taken the issue to the UN International Labor Organization. But PdVSA relies heavily on contract workers there will be 30,000 temporary positions this year on top of jobs held by employees. Without defending the practice of contracting, the fact is that permanent jobs are reserved for the elite mostly managers, administrators and skilled technicians and these are the people who walked off the job and crippled operations. The position of the government, which is supported by the rank-and-file, is that those fired abandoned their employment for 63 consecutive days, allowing PdVSA to apply section 102 of the Labor Code and terminate them. At any rate strikes in any part of the world may only be called over labor grievances, and Ortega's CTV was demanding the president's resignation. It was not a legal labor action but an illegal political action.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
Saturday, April 19, 2008
electoral revolution in nepal:
While focusing on the individual's path to enlightenment, Buddhism did not ignore social reality. The early order of monks and nuns applied itself to charitable work, such as the establishment of hospitals and shelters for the homeless. In an extraordinary break with the social order, Siddhartha Gautama (a.k.a Buddha) rejected the caste system, declared that those of any background could be enlightened, and insisted on delivering his sermons in the local dialects wherever he traveled. He was in that sense a revolutionary. And a world-conqueror: the Buddha directed his followers to spread the word throughout the world, and thus Buddhism gradually spread from the Himalayan foothills to Sri Lanka, to northeastern Iran, to China and Japan, to southeast Asia.
While focusing on the individual's path to enlightenment, Buddhism did not ignore social reality. The early order of monks and nuns applied itself to charitable work, such as the establishment of hospitals and shelters for the homeless. In an extraordinary break with the social order, Siddhartha Gautama (a.k.a Buddha) rejected the caste system, declared that those of any background could be enlightened, and insisted on delivering his sermons in the local dialects wherever he traveled. He was in that sense a revolutionary. And a world-conqueror: the Buddha directed his followers to spread the word throughout the world, and thus Buddhism gradually spread from the Himalayan foothills to Sri Lanka, to northeastern Iran, to China and Japan, to southeast Asia.
the trillion dollar crisis:
Not one summit of the eight most industrialized countries, the G8, ends without a promise to increase ODA, particularly towards Africa, the continent which is most affected by poverty. Since 1970, the rich countries have promised to increase it to 0.7% of their Gross National Income (GNI). This figure is respected by only five countries: Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg, Denmark and the Netherlands. Last place is occupied by the US, with a figure of 0.16%.
(...) From a global perspective, the ODA does not rise above 0.28% of the GNI, despite a series of statistical manipulations designed to camouflage the low value of the aid money given by rich countries: in fact, they include in the ODA dubious figures such as debt relief, the expenses of the US to rebuild Iraqi and Afghan infrastructures that it destroyed, the tuition fees of students from the South who study in the North, the salaries of expatriated staff and the multitude of consultants who defend the interests of donor countries or who produce costly and useless reports. Furthermore, this aid is largely directed towards countries of geostrategic interest to the donor country, with flagrant disregard for the real needs of the countries of the South: apart from Iraq and Afghanistan, the major beneficiaries of US aid are the Sudan, Colombia, and obviously Israel.
(...) On the other hand, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the potential cost of the current international crisis is approximately 1,000 billion dollars, a result of the so-called 'subprime' crisis that emerged in the summer of 2007 and continues to wreak havoc. In a report published on the 8th of April, the IMF has estimated this cost at precisely 945 billion dollars for the international financial system, of which 565 billion is directly linked to the system of risk-laden mortgage loans. Here is what happened: to obtain astronomical profits on their liquidities, credit institutions loaned out to an already heavily indebted sector of the population, within the poor or middle classes, at a fixed and medium rate for the first two years to entice clients, before the rate increases sharply during the third year. The lenders asserted to the borrowers that the property that they were buying, which also acted as guarantee against the loan, would rapidly rise in value due to ascending prices in the real estate market. In 2007 the real estate bubble burst. The crisis then spread to multiple financial actors which had devised extraordinary debt structures and had carried out enormous operations off the books.
(...) In 2000, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) advanced the figure of 80 billion dollars over ten years as the amount required to guarantee universal access to drinking water--yes, universal , a decent diet for children, primary education for all, basic health care, including gynecological care. Thus, the challenge was to find 800 billion dollars in total. They were not found, and the living conditions of billions of individuals have continued to decline. The abrupt rise in the price of foodstuffs, due to the development of the production of biofuels, has now thrown tens of millions of inhabitants of Africa, Latin America and Asia into absolute poverty. Food riots have erupted in Haiti, Egypt, the Ivory Coast, Senegal, Cameroon, Burkina Faso and this is only the beginning. Instead of approaching the Millennium Development Goals, however tentative these may be, we are getting further away at great speed. The current banking crisis will cost 1,000 billion dollars, and will prove, that in the case of the 800 billion proposed by the UN to guarantee some basic human rights, it was the political will that was lacking. It is a flagrant violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international treaties. It is unacceptable and unforgivable. And it is the very logic of the economic model that should be questioned.
Not one summit of the eight most industrialized countries, the G8, ends without a promise to increase ODA, particularly towards Africa, the continent which is most affected by poverty. Since 1970, the rich countries have promised to increase it to 0.7% of their Gross National Income (GNI). This figure is respected by only five countries: Norway, Sweden, Luxembourg, Denmark and the Netherlands. Last place is occupied by the US, with a figure of 0.16%.
(...) From a global perspective, the ODA does not rise above 0.28% of the GNI, despite a series of statistical manipulations designed to camouflage the low value of the aid money given by rich countries: in fact, they include in the ODA dubious figures such as debt relief, the expenses of the US to rebuild Iraqi and Afghan infrastructures that it destroyed, the tuition fees of students from the South who study in the North, the salaries of expatriated staff and the multitude of consultants who defend the interests of donor countries or who produce costly and useless reports. Furthermore, this aid is largely directed towards countries of geostrategic interest to the donor country, with flagrant disregard for the real needs of the countries of the South: apart from Iraq and Afghanistan, the major beneficiaries of US aid are the Sudan, Colombia, and obviously Israel.
(...) On the other hand, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the potential cost of the current international crisis is approximately 1,000 billion dollars, a result of the so-called 'subprime' crisis that emerged in the summer of 2007 and continues to wreak havoc. In a report published on the 8th of April, the IMF has estimated this cost at precisely 945 billion dollars for the international financial system, of which 565 billion is directly linked to the system of risk-laden mortgage loans. Here is what happened: to obtain astronomical profits on their liquidities, credit institutions loaned out to an already heavily indebted sector of the population, within the poor or middle classes, at a fixed and medium rate for the first two years to entice clients, before the rate increases sharply during the third year. The lenders asserted to the borrowers that the property that they were buying, which also acted as guarantee against the loan, would rapidly rise in value due to ascending prices in the real estate market. In 2007 the real estate bubble burst. The crisis then spread to multiple financial actors which had devised extraordinary debt structures and had carried out enormous operations off the books.
(...) In 2000, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) advanced the figure of 80 billion dollars over ten years as the amount required to guarantee universal access to drinking water--yes, universal , a decent diet for children, primary education for all, basic health care, including gynecological care. Thus, the challenge was to find 800 billion dollars in total. They were not found, and the living conditions of billions of individuals have continued to decline. The abrupt rise in the price of foodstuffs, due to the development of the production of biofuels, has now thrown tens of millions of inhabitants of Africa, Latin America and Asia into absolute poverty. Food riots have erupted in Haiti, Egypt, the Ivory Coast, Senegal, Cameroon, Burkina Faso and this is only the beginning. Instead of approaching the Millennium Development Goals, however tentative these may be, we are getting further away at great speed. The current banking crisis will cost 1,000 billion dollars, and will prove, that in the case of the 800 billion proposed by the UN to guarantee some basic human rights, it was the political will that was lacking. It is a flagrant violation of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and other international treaties. It is unacceptable and unforgivable. And it is the very logic of the economic model that should be questioned.
losing haiti:
But Brazilian soldier Tailon Ruppenthal is less starry eyed about MINUSTAH. In a recent memoir of his tour of duty, Rupenthal writes, "After a few months even getting out of bed is hard. You remember that you will cross paths with all those people who are starving but there's nothing you can do." The Brazilian, who now suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome, concludes, "we are losing the real war: against poverty Only the fight against poverty will bring peace. When will they see that?"
(...) Schuller told me, "It behooves us not to think of it as a 'failed state.' Rather, it is best understood as a successfully failed state. As of last estimate, 65% of Haiti's government revenue comes from international agencies, 84% of its rice grown abroad. This is because of U.S. and other Northern countries' economic policies wherein Haiti's ability to feed itself with domestic rice production was wiped out by Washington-subsidized imports that U.S. agribusiness has profited from. At Ronald Reagan's behest, Haiti initiated a series of neoliberal measures in the 1980s, including trade liberalization, privatization and decreasing investment in agriculture, that led to the disappearance of Haiti's cotton and sugar export industries. During the 1990s, the U.S. conditioned its food aid sent to alleviate a hunger crisis with demands that Haiti lower its tariffs and open its markets to U.S. imports. This subsidized U.S. rice was much cheaper than Haitian rice, forcing local farmers out of business. Over the same period, Haiti became increasingly more reliant on the International Financial Institutions, which imposed more neoliberal conditions on its help. Since 1980, when Haiti started receiving the Banks' help in earnest, its per capita Gross Domestic Product has shrunk by 38.3%. Haiti is left with a 1.4 billion dollar multinational debt, with a debt service next year of almost 80 million. In addition to draining resources from needed sectors such as health, education, or developing national production, this debt has served as leverage for the IMF and World Bank to impose even more neoliberal measures."
But Brazilian soldier Tailon Ruppenthal is less starry eyed about MINUSTAH. In a recent memoir of his tour of duty, Rupenthal writes, "After a few months even getting out of bed is hard. You remember that you will cross paths with all those people who are starving but there's nothing you can do." The Brazilian, who now suffers from post-traumatic stress syndrome, concludes, "we are losing the real war: against poverty Only the fight against poverty will bring peace. When will they see that?"
(...) Schuller told me, "It behooves us not to think of it as a 'failed state.' Rather, it is best understood as a successfully failed state. As of last estimate, 65% of Haiti's government revenue comes from international agencies, 84% of its rice grown abroad. This is because of U.S. and other Northern countries' economic policies wherein Haiti's ability to feed itself with domestic rice production was wiped out by Washington-subsidized imports that U.S. agribusiness has profited from. At Ronald Reagan's behest, Haiti initiated a series of neoliberal measures in the 1980s, including trade liberalization, privatization and decreasing investment in agriculture, that led to the disappearance of Haiti's cotton and sugar export industries. During the 1990s, the U.S. conditioned its food aid sent to alleviate a hunger crisis with demands that Haiti lower its tariffs and open its markets to U.S. imports. This subsidized U.S. rice was much cheaper than Haitian rice, forcing local farmers out of business. Over the same period, Haiti became increasingly more reliant on the International Financial Institutions, which imposed more neoliberal conditions on its help. Since 1980, when Haiti started receiving the Banks' help in earnest, its per capita Gross Domestic Product has shrunk by 38.3%. Haiti is left with a 1.4 billion dollar multinational debt, with a debt service next year of almost 80 million. In addition to draining resources from needed sectors such as health, education, or developing national production, this debt has served as leverage for the IMF and World Bank to impose even more neoliberal measures."
resurrecting greenspan:
Hillary Clinton proposed that Congress show its bipartisan spirit by appointing an "emergency working group on foreclosures," to be led by none other than Alan Greenspan and earlier Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, and Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Her idea was for them to come up with a plan to alleviate the subprime and financial crisis. This seems like calling in arsonists to help put out the fire that they and their own constituency had set in the first place. Their lifelong interest, after all, had been to promote deregulation and special tax favoritism for their Wall Street constituency, highlighted by repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999 under Pres. Clinton. Representing the banking sector and Wall Street (and hence being essentially Republicans in spirit), they were precisely the lobbyists most in favor of anti-labor, pro-creditor policies.
(...) ...it was Greenspan that acted as a kind of economic Karl Rove in crafting anti-labor policies favoring the very rich, above all the Social Security tax-shift onto labor's shoulders to which Mrs. Clinton pointed. He welcomed recession as an excuse to cut taxes, ostensibly to "jump-start" economic growth but actually producing a benefit mainly for wealthy investors and property owners.
(...) The Bush Administration's enormous commitment of public funds to support Wall Street prompted columnist Martin Wolf of the Financial Times to announce that the free market was dead. "Remember Friday March 14, 2008," he wrote; "it was the day the dream of global free-market capitalism died. Deregulation has reached its limits." The price for Treasury support would have to be an end to the deregulation that had permitted the debt crisis to reach such unprecedented proportions. As evidence of the new attitude Wolf cited "the remark by Joseph Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank, that 'I no longer believe in the market's self-healing power.'"
(...) Financial lobbyists accordingly anticipate that "the coming fight will rival the storm leading up to the 1999 passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act [which repealed Glass-Steagall]. That law made it easier for securities firms and banks to be owned by the same company, dropping regulatory barriers in place since the Great Depression. In 1998 and 1999, when Congress was finalizing passage of that law, the financial-services industry spent a combined $417 million on lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In 2007, financial-services companies spent more than $402 million on lobbying, led by $138 million from the insurance industry."
(...) Repeal of Glass-Steagall gave the subprime debacle its jump start by removing the Depression-era roadblock from bank merging with brokers. This permitted financial conglomerates to be formed and gave them the ability to securitize (that is package), loans as investments. Vertical financial conglomerates were formed, starting with Citibank's merger with Travelers Insurance, and leading up to the recent intention of Bank of America to acquire the troubled Countrywide Financial, the nation's leading subprime lender.
(...) The implication is that anything that lowers costs to Wall Street--by rolling back regulatory bureaucracies and reporting requirements such as are called for by the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation--will be passed on to customers. Such presumptions ignore the fact that Wall Street prefers to pay out its profits as bonuses or dividends rather than pass on cost savings. What is passed onto its customers instead is runaway CEO compensation. "Market discipline" has not kept financial markets honest or low-priced. Deceptive subprime practices have made dollar investments a pariah in global financial markets. Investors have lost faith in the nation's investment bankers, mortgage brokers and credit-rating firms, drying up the market for U.S. mortgage-backed securities and leading to their being dumped across the board.
(...)What seems most remarkable in Mr. Paulson's and Dr. Bernanke's comments is the absence of quantitative discussion of just what the "systemic risk" is. The bailout is to be paid by the non-financial sector, above all labor ("consumers") to "save the system." But just what is the system? It certainly is not industrial production. It is more a faith that compound interest can keep on expanding ad infinitum. The reality is that the exponentially soaring debt overhead threatens to plunge the economy into chronic depression as interest and other financial charges eat further and further into the economy's ability to spend on consumption and tangible capital investment. To ignore this financial dynamic is to turn economics into a junk science.
(...) For the past decade the banking system and its mortgage-broker affiliates have avoided the usual wave of defaults and insolvencies by lending debtors enough money to pay the interest charges. Adding the interest onto the debt in this way is known as a Ponzi scheme. It requires an exponentially growing influx of funds to pay investors and creditors, and hence cannot be sustained for long, because no economy in history has grown at the exponential rates needed to keep up with the debt overhead. This is the basic problem at the core of today's economic policy. It aims to save the "sanctity of debt," that is, the financial sector's claims on the rest of the economy. But this attempt only polarizes the economy between creditors at the top of the pyramid and an increasingly indebted base at the bottom.
(...) So let's start by discarding the inane propaganda about unmanaged (that is, deregulated) "free" economies, the faith-based belief that self-regulating economic systems exist that must not be "interfered with" by government bureaucrats, formerly known as regulatory agencies, attorneys general and state prosecutors, Congressional oversight committees and what remains of New Deal agencies. This anti-government, anti-regulatory propaganda has been pushed for decades so that public agencies and Congress, supposed to act as representatives of the people, remain only passive spectators to an economy left in private hands for financial profit. The reality is that all economies are managed, either by the private sector or by government--usually by a combination of the two. Any successful economy engages in forward planning, and any well-balanced economy shapes how "the market" operates. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was all about how wise governments should shape--and tax--their markets. America's present-day economic system didn't evolve through natural forces, much less by divine intervention. Its industrial takeoff was subsidized by protective tariffs, internal improvements--that is, public infrastructure spending--and increasingly progressive taxation.
Hillary Clinton proposed that Congress show its bipartisan spirit by appointing an "emergency working group on foreclosures," to be led by none other than Alan Greenspan and earlier Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker, and Clinton Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin. Her idea was for them to come up with a plan to alleviate the subprime and financial crisis. This seems like calling in arsonists to help put out the fire that they and their own constituency had set in the first place. Their lifelong interest, after all, had been to promote deregulation and special tax favoritism for their Wall Street constituency, highlighted by repeal of Glass-Steagall in 1999 under Pres. Clinton. Representing the banking sector and Wall Street (and hence being essentially Republicans in spirit), they were precisely the lobbyists most in favor of anti-labor, pro-creditor policies.
(...) ...it was Greenspan that acted as a kind of economic Karl Rove in crafting anti-labor policies favoring the very rich, above all the Social Security tax-shift onto labor's shoulders to which Mrs. Clinton pointed. He welcomed recession as an excuse to cut taxes, ostensibly to "jump-start" economic growth but actually producing a benefit mainly for wealthy investors and property owners.
(...) The Bush Administration's enormous commitment of public funds to support Wall Street prompted columnist Martin Wolf of the Financial Times to announce that the free market was dead. "Remember Friday March 14, 2008," he wrote; "it was the day the dream of global free-market capitalism died. Deregulation has reached its limits." The price for Treasury support would have to be an end to the deregulation that had permitted the debt crisis to reach such unprecedented proportions. As evidence of the new attitude Wolf cited "the remark by Joseph Ackermann, chief executive of Deutsche Bank, that 'I no longer believe in the market's self-healing power.'"
(...) Financial lobbyists accordingly anticipate that "the coming fight will rival the storm leading up to the 1999 passage of the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act [which repealed Glass-Steagall]. That law made it easier for securities firms and banks to be owned by the same company, dropping regulatory barriers in place since the Great Depression. In 1998 and 1999, when Congress was finalizing passage of that law, the financial-services industry spent a combined $417 million on lobbying, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. In 2007, financial-services companies spent more than $402 million on lobbying, led by $138 million from the insurance industry."
(...) Repeal of Glass-Steagall gave the subprime debacle its jump start by removing the Depression-era roadblock from bank merging with brokers. This permitted financial conglomerates to be formed and gave them the ability to securitize (that is package), loans as investments. Vertical financial conglomerates were formed, starting with Citibank's merger with Travelers Insurance, and leading up to the recent intention of Bank of America to acquire the troubled Countrywide Financial, the nation's leading subprime lender.
(...) The implication is that anything that lowers costs to Wall Street--by rolling back regulatory bureaucracies and reporting requirements such as are called for by the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation--will be passed on to customers. Such presumptions ignore the fact that Wall Street prefers to pay out its profits as bonuses or dividends rather than pass on cost savings. What is passed onto its customers instead is runaway CEO compensation. "Market discipline" has not kept financial markets honest or low-priced. Deceptive subprime practices have made dollar investments a pariah in global financial markets. Investors have lost faith in the nation's investment bankers, mortgage brokers and credit-rating firms, drying up the market for U.S. mortgage-backed securities and leading to their being dumped across the board.
(...)What seems most remarkable in Mr. Paulson's and Dr. Bernanke's comments is the absence of quantitative discussion of just what the "systemic risk" is. The bailout is to be paid by the non-financial sector, above all labor ("consumers") to "save the system." But just what is the system? It certainly is not industrial production. It is more a faith that compound interest can keep on expanding ad infinitum. The reality is that the exponentially soaring debt overhead threatens to plunge the economy into chronic depression as interest and other financial charges eat further and further into the economy's ability to spend on consumption and tangible capital investment. To ignore this financial dynamic is to turn economics into a junk science.
(...) For the past decade the banking system and its mortgage-broker affiliates have avoided the usual wave of defaults and insolvencies by lending debtors enough money to pay the interest charges. Adding the interest onto the debt in this way is known as a Ponzi scheme. It requires an exponentially growing influx of funds to pay investors and creditors, and hence cannot be sustained for long, because no economy in history has grown at the exponential rates needed to keep up with the debt overhead. This is the basic problem at the core of today's economic policy. It aims to save the "sanctity of debt," that is, the financial sector's claims on the rest of the economy. But this attempt only polarizes the economy between creditors at the top of the pyramid and an increasingly indebted base at the bottom.
(...) So let's start by discarding the inane propaganda about unmanaged (that is, deregulated) "free" economies, the faith-based belief that self-regulating economic systems exist that must not be "interfered with" by government bureaucrats, formerly known as regulatory agencies, attorneys general and state prosecutors, Congressional oversight committees and what remains of New Deal agencies. This anti-government, anti-regulatory propaganda has been pushed for decades so that public agencies and Congress, supposed to act as representatives of the people, remain only passive spectators to an economy left in private hands for financial profit. The reality is that all economies are managed, either by the private sector or by government--usually by a combination of the two. Any successful economy engages in forward planning, and any well-balanced economy shapes how "the market" operates. Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations was all about how wise governments should shape--and tax--their markets. America's present-day economic system didn't evolve through natural forces, much less by divine intervention. Its industrial takeoff was subsidized by protective tariffs, internal improvements--that is, public infrastructure spending--and increasingly progressive taxation.
an interview with robert fisk:
RF: There are several things. First of all, there's the inability of many journalists from the United States to actually tell the truth about the Israel-Palestine situation--hence, occupied territories are called disputed territories, the wall is called the security barrier, a colony or settlement is called a neighbourhood or an outpost. Which means that if you see a Palestinian chucking a stone, if it's about an occupation, you can understand it, but if it's about a dispute, which you can presumably settle over a cup of tea, then obviously the Palestinians are generically violent. So you demean one side in this appalling conflict.
(...) RF: Then you have this business where television will not show what we see, for reasons of so-called "bad taste". I remember once being on the phone to a TV editor in London when Jazeera were asked to feed some tape of children killed and wounded by British shell fire in Basra, and the guy started saying, "there's no point feeding us this, we can't show this"the first excuse was, "people will be having their tea, so we can't put it on", and then it was, "this is sort of pornography, we don't show this". And it ended up--it is mesmeric to listen to this stuff - the last thing was "We have to show respect for the dead". So we don't show any respect for them when they are alive, we blow them to bits, and then we show respect for themSo because of this - and these bloodless sandpits with ex-generals pontificating - it becomes a game; you start propagating this idea that war is primarily about victory or defeat - when in fact, it's about death, and the infliction of massive pain.
(...) RF: I was in Iraq in 1991, when the British and Americans had been bombing one of the highways. There were women and children dead and in bits, and all these dogs came out of the desert and started eating themIf you saw what I saw you would never ever think of supporting war of any kind against anyone again.
(...) RF: Just as the wall is called a fence instead of a wall, and it's a neighbourhood not a settlement, so these are now contractors rather than mercenaries. I've always called them mercenaries. When they say two 'contractors' have been murdered, the idea that they are going around in an armoured humvee loaded with weapons doesn't come into the brain pod immediately does it?"
(...) RF: But you don't actually have to set off car bombs to do this. Look at the way we as journalists publish all these maps, you know--Shi'ites at the bottom, Sunnis in the middle, Kurds at the top. The British did the same in Belfast - green for Catholics, Orange for protestants, medium sherry colour for mixed areas, for people who are inconsiderate enough to marry across the religious divide. But we don't, obviously, do these ethnic maps about Birmingham or Bradford or Washington. I could draw you an ethnic map of Toronto, with the suburb of Mississauga green for Muslim. But they wouldn't print it. Because in our superior, civilised Western society, we don't acknowledge it. In their society, we spend our time pointing it out to them. I was in New York some months ago, and on the front cover of Time was "How to tell a Sunni from a Shia." Can you imagine it?
(...) The dilemma for the US in Iraq, as Fisk puts it, is that "they must leave, they will leave, but they can't leave--that is the equation that turns sand into blood". For those who want to understand this process, and what it means in human terms, rather than simply be lied to about it, Robert Fisk's reporting is a good place to start.
RF: There are several things. First of all, there's the inability of many journalists from the United States to actually tell the truth about the Israel-Palestine situation--hence, occupied territories are called disputed territories, the wall is called the security barrier, a colony or settlement is called a neighbourhood or an outpost. Which means that if you see a Palestinian chucking a stone, if it's about an occupation, you can understand it, but if it's about a dispute, which you can presumably settle over a cup of tea, then obviously the Palestinians are generically violent. So you demean one side in this appalling conflict.
(...) RF: Then you have this business where television will not show what we see, for reasons of so-called "bad taste". I remember once being on the phone to a TV editor in London when Jazeera were asked to feed some tape of children killed and wounded by British shell fire in Basra, and the guy started saying, "there's no point feeding us this, we can't show this"the first excuse was, "people will be having their tea, so we can't put it on", and then it was, "this is sort of pornography, we don't show this". And it ended up--it is mesmeric to listen to this stuff - the last thing was "We have to show respect for the dead". So we don't show any respect for them when they are alive, we blow them to bits, and then we show respect for themSo because of this - and these bloodless sandpits with ex-generals pontificating - it becomes a game; you start propagating this idea that war is primarily about victory or defeat - when in fact, it's about death, and the infliction of massive pain.
(...) RF: I was in Iraq in 1991, when the British and Americans had been bombing one of the highways. There were women and children dead and in bits, and all these dogs came out of the desert and started eating themIf you saw what I saw you would never ever think of supporting war of any kind against anyone again.
(...) RF: Just as the wall is called a fence instead of a wall, and it's a neighbourhood not a settlement, so these are now contractors rather than mercenaries. I've always called them mercenaries. When they say two 'contractors' have been murdered, the idea that they are going around in an armoured humvee loaded with weapons doesn't come into the brain pod immediately does it?"
(...) RF: But you don't actually have to set off car bombs to do this. Look at the way we as journalists publish all these maps, you know--Shi'ites at the bottom, Sunnis in the middle, Kurds at the top. The British did the same in Belfast - green for Catholics, Orange for protestants, medium sherry colour for mixed areas, for people who are inconsiderate enough to marry across the religious divide. But we don't, obviously, do these ethnic maps about Birmingham or Bradford or Washington. I could draw you an ethnic map of Toronto, with the suburb of Mississauga green for Muslim. But they wouldn't print it. Because in our superior, civilised Western society, we don't acknowledge it. In their society, we spend our time pointing it out to them. I was in New York some months ago, and on the front cover of Time was "How to tell a Sunni from a Shia." Can you imagine it?
(...) The dilemma for the US in Iraq, as Fisk puts it, is that "they must leave, they will leave, but they can't leave--that is the equation that turns sand into blood". For those who want to understand this process, and what it means in human terms, rather than simply be lied to about it, Robert Fisk's reporting is a good place to start.
a himalyan surprise:
The communists here had always been at the forefront of democratic struggle. Formed in 1949, the Communist Party of Nepal (CPN) went through all the twists and turns of international communist movement. It split. It re-united. Only to split again. It was a unification of CPN (ML) and CPN (Marxist) led to CPN (UML-Unified Marxist Leninist) in 1991 while there was a split in Samyukta Jana Morcha Nepal (SJMN) in late 1993 fathered CPN (Maoists). At the time of split, SJMN was third largest party in the parliament with nine MPs.
(...) Hence UML was voted by the electorate to power in 1994. But the communist government not only failed to deliver the land reforms it had promised, it also disillusioned its cadres. An isolated UML government was easily removed by the monarch in August 1995
(...) As the UML was losing its electoral base in the towns, the Maoists were gaining ground on the countryside. An uprising launched in 1996, had soon assumed the control of almost 70 percent of the countryside.
(...) However, it was Maoists radical ideas on land reform and negation of the caste system that won them support. They began running the districts under their control through people's committees and implemented land reforms, besides setting up "people's courts".
(...) Traditionally, India and Britain supported the Nepalese monarchy, but, of late, the US has increasingly been extending its support too. The Bush administration put the CPN-M on its list of terrorist organisations on October 31, 2003, and also signed a five-year agreement "for co-operation in fighting terrorism and preventing possible terror attacks" with Nepal in 2002.
Washington may have concerns about the impact of instability in Nepal on the Indian subcontinent as a whole. But the major reason for the growing US military ties with Nepal was the country's strategic position. Washington has a series of military arrangements with countries bordering China, stretching from its new bases in the Central Asian republics through South-East Asia to its formal allies in north-east Asia: Japan and South Korea. Therefore, the United States became a major provider of military assistance to Nepal, allocating over $29 million in grants to Nepal to pay for US weapons, services and training from October 2001 to October 2004.
The communists here had always been at the forefront of democratic struggle. Formed in 1949, the Communist Party of Nepal (CPN) went through all the twists and turns of international communist movement. It split. It re-united. Only to split again. It was a unification of CPN (ML) and CPN (Marxist) led to CPN (UML-Unified Marxist Leninist) in 1991 while there was a split in Samyukta Jana Morcha Nepal (SJMN) in late 1993 fathered CPN (Maoists). At the time of split, SJMN was third largest party in the parliament with nine MPs.
(...) Hence UML was voted by the electorate to power in 1994. But the communist government not only failed to deliver the land reforms it had promised, it also disillusioned its cadres. An isolated UML government was easily removed by the monarch in August 1995
(...) As the UML was losing its electoral base in the towns, the Maoists were gaining ground on the countryside. An uprising launched in 1996, had soon assumed the control of almost 70 percent of the countryside.
(...) However, it was Maoists radical ideas on land reform and negation of the caste system that won them support. They began running the districts under their control through people's committees and implemented land reforms, besides setting up "people's courts".
(...) Traditionally, India and Britain supported the Nepalese monarchy, but, of late, the US has increasingly been extending its support too. The Bush administration put the CPN-M on its list of terrorist organisations on October 31, 2003, and also signed a five-year agreement "for co-operation in fighting terrorism and preventing possible terror attacks" with Nepal in 2002.
Washington may have concerns about the impact of instability in Nepal on the Indian subcontinent as a whole. But the major reason for the growing US military ties with Nepal was the country's strategic position. Washington has a series of military arrangements with countries bordering China, stretching from its new bases in the Central Asian republics through South-East Asia to its formal allies in north-east Asia: Japan and South Korea. Therefore, the United States became a major provider of military assistance to Nepal, allocating over $29 million in grants to Nepal to pay for US weapons, services and training from October 2001 to October 2004.
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