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Yoshie Furuhashi | 1 Oct 2005 01:28
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40 Million Workers Strike on India: a Report and/or Photos?

> Millions join national strike in India to protest privatisation plans
>
> 1 hour, 40 minutes ago
>
> NEW DELHI (AFP) - A national strike has disrupted flights and shut   
> down government offices and banks in India as millions of state  
> workers staged a one-day protest over moves to liberalise Asia's   
> fourth-largest economy.
>
> Television station NDTV said some 40 million workers had joined  
> Thursday's strike, matching the prediction of M.K. Pandhe,  
> president of the trade union group CITU, who Thursday described the  
> response as  "unprecedented".
>

Is there anyone among posters or lurkers or archive watchers here who  
participated in or observed the strike?  Send me a report and/or  
photos at yoshie at monthlyreview.org!

Yoshie Furuhashi
<http://montages.blogspot.com>
<http://monthlyreview.org>
<http://mrzine.org>
* Mahmoud Ahmadinejad: <http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/07/mahmoud- 
ahmadinejads-face.html>;  <http://montages.blogspot.com/2005/07/chvez- 
congratulates-ahmadinejad.html>; <http://montages.blogspot.com/ 
2005/06/iranian-working-class-rejects.html>

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RALFOR | 1 Oct 2005 02:21
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Re: Peak oil and politics

John Flanders  labels Cuba a "socialist society".  I  am curious to know 
John's definition of socialism and how Cuba fits into this  definition.            
             Ralph
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Louis Proyect | 1 Oct 2005 03:59
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Re: Re: Peak oil and politics


>John Flanders  labels Cuba a "socialist society".  I  am curious to know
>John's definition of socialism and how Cuba fits into 
>this  definition.
>              Ralph

I think that John meant that Cuba was in transition from capitalism to 
socialism, in the same fashion that Trotsky described the USSR in 
"Revolution Betrayed". Such societies can move forward, as Cuba is 
obviously doing, or they can lapse backwards into capitalism as China and 
Russia have, among all the other countries that constituted the Soviet 
bloc. Since you are new to Marxmail, or at least posting to Marxmail, a 
word or two about the "Russian questions". We try to devote as little time 
as possible to them here since they inevitably lead to bitter disputes 
about "betrayal", etc.  

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sshingav | 1 Oct 2005 04:16
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Defend counter-recruitment protester

FORWARD WIDELY...

To Friends and Supporters,

We have just learned that Charles Peterson, the student who was maced
and assaulted by police at yesterday's counter recruitment protest at
Holyoke Community College, has received a letter from the HCC campus
police, informing him that due to "his conduct"  he is indefinitely
banned from campus. If he steps foot on the property he will be
arrested for trespassing.

In other words, without any due process, or the opportunity to even
speak to administrators, Charles has been banned from campus for
the "crime" of being maced in the face by police officers.

It is important to say that Charles Peterson, who witnesses described
as playing a moderating role at yesterday's protest, is an upstanding
member of the HCC community.  He is the recipient of the David James
Taylor Excellence in Philosophy Award. He  is Vice President for
Academic Affairs on the Student Senate. He is a member of the College's
Learning Communities Committee, and is a frequent contributor to the
student newspaper.

Furthermore, Officer Scott Landry, the officer who sprayed mace in
Charles's face yesterday, is also an advisor to the College Republican
Club.  The College Republicans were present during the protest
yesterday, cheering on the police as they attacked students.

Where is due process for Charles Peterson?
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Walter Lippmann | 1 Oct 2005 04:33
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In evacuations, it's said, U.S. can learn from Cuba

(It's been a month now and we continue seeing articles along
these lines. I hope readers will circulate them among friends
and other interested audiences.)
==============================================================

In evacuations, it's said, U.S. can learn from Cuba
By TOM PRECIOUS
News Albany Bureau
9/30/2005
http://www.buffalonews.com/editorial/20050930/1014956.asp	

Henry Louis Taylor Jr., UB urban planning expert, urges a look at
Third World methods.

ALBANY - The United States should turn to the lessons of Cuba and
other Third World nations to help avoid a repeat of the New Orleans
evacuation horrors in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, according
to an urban planning expert at the University at Buffalo.

"You wouldn't have seen that happen in Cuba," Henry Louis Taylor Jr.
said of the much-criticized efforts to evacuate New Orleans'
residents, especially those from low-income neighborhoods.

Taylor, a speaker at a UB-led conference Thursday on disaster issues
at the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government near the
Capitol, said Cuba and other underdeveloped countries have built
effective and cheap evacuation systems that rely chiefly on
neighborhood groups to alert people and then get them to safety
during disasters.
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Mark Lause | 1 Oct 2005 04:43
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RE: Bill Bennett racism

The funniest thing about this--if there's anything funny about having
had such a malevolent nitwit as head of Education--is that Bennett
clearly doesn't "get" why people are so angry and offended.

He corrects people that he was NOT advocating aborting all black
fetuses...just pointing out that it would lower the crime rate.

I remember an interview with Tom Lehrer, the songwriter-satirist in
which he was asked why he had stopped producing records.  Referring to
the Reagan team, he said he didn't know how to spoof what was already a
spoof....

Solidarity!
Mark L.

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Nick Halliday | 1 Oct 2005 06:00
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Re: Peak oil and politics

RM writes:

>
> However, none of this has anything to do with the finiteness of oil, and the
> possibility that supplies just may have already peaked.  If peak oil has
> arrived, you won't find the oil companies or Bush and lap-dog Blair making
> any strong statements about it -- that wouldn't be good for maintaining
> profitability.  Panic on the stock markets and consumers withholding
> spending is not necessarily good, even in the short-term, for sustaining
> profits in a capitalist economy.....

Oil is finite in the sense that we can imagine the total amount that
is out there, in the earth, under the seabeds, etc. is indeed an
amount X which will not be added to and can only be subtracted from.
So in fact the overall amount of oil peaked the time period up until 
humans pumped their first drop. Supplies are a function of the ability
to get it out of the ground, refined into a usable form, and into the
market. Supplies are changeable as are demand and consumption.

Again, it is simply a begging of the question to say since oil
production may have peaked, we should act like it has peaked.
Production in fact is still going up (and immediate supplies are,
well, inundated), but some analysts see it being outstripped, sooner
than expected, by demand, much of it coming from China. So the current
price of oil is based on the belief that supplies will tighten and
that the price of oil will continue to rise--even in the face of the
fact that right now there is more oil being produced than consumed.

Does capitalism avoid panics? It depends. US capitalists cheered panic
during the Asian crisis of the late 90s. It led to a collapse in the
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Nick Halliday | 1 Oct 2005 06:03
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Re: Peak oil and politics

I just wrote:

> You know when you have the most political and social crises in
> countries that are large oil exporters? WHEN THE PRICE OF OIL IS LOW.

I should have added: or when the production in that country is in
decline or when a country that was an exporter has to become a net
importer to meet domestic demand.

NH

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glparramatta | 1 Oct 2005 06:19
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Re: U.N. = U.S.

Louis,

It is unfair to bunch the DSP's support for the East Timorese liberation 
movement's call for an international peacekeeping force, with those that 
call for some sort of ``algebraic'' UN intervention in Iraq. The DSP has 
very successfully led the opposition to such calls for a UN figleaf for 
the US-led force in Iraq, which has been pushed by the right-wing of the 
movement associated with the Australian Labor Party and other liberals.

The specific circumstances around DSP's backing of the Timorese 
intervention have been debated here extensively before, but the context 
is very different and were outlined in a Links article in 2000: 
http://www.dsp.org.au/links/back/issue14/14townsend.html

Revo regards,

Norm Dixon.

Louis Proyect wrote:

>
> There was support for United Nations intervention from even more 
> radical quarters in Australia. While it is undoubtedly one of the more 
> principled and far-sighted groups on the far left, the Democratic 
> Socialist Party had no problems calling for U.N. intervention in East 
> Timor. On September 6, 1999, they declared that:
>
> "The Democratic Socialist Party calls on all supporters of democracy 
> to mobilise to demand that the Australian government insist that the 
> United Nations authorise the immediate dispatch of Australian troops
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BHANDARI, RAKESH | 1 Oct 2005 06:57
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Bill Bennet racism

Bennett draws on study by Levitt. I criticized that study on lbo-talk in August, 1999. here are 
some of my posts
_____________
In a helpful and appreciated note, Nathan wrote:

>higher abortion rates could be the result of other factors that themselves
>relate to a later decline in crime.  Obviously, multi-variate regression
>tries to filter out all those factors and the assumption is that given two
>cities with all factors filtered out, if abortion is the only thing left
>standing, you have proved causality.

Well, if we try to assign partial coefficients to unemployment, poverty and fewer teenagers, their 
retort seems obvious (though I can't access their paper from here): abortion accounts for the 
reduction in teenagers as % of pop. (esp. of the type prone to crime),  unemployment and poverty. 
It seems that they will claim that these other 'factors' were relatively or first reduced in those 
states early to legalize abortion--though I would be surprised if their evidence turns out be very 
strong in this regard.

Moreover, this study would have no counterfactual import ("Extrapolating our estimates out of 
sample to a counterfactual in which there were no abortions, crime rates might be 10-20 percent 
higher than they currently are with abortion") without the operation of a socio economic machine 
in which those surplus to capital's demands are tracked for poverty, unemployment and 
criminalization. Yet how does one index such a machine in the regression analysis--much less 
determine its durability against evolutionary transformation or external modification on the basis 
of such statistical analysis, though the discovered 'causal' relationship between abortion and 
reduced crime would have no relative stability or counterfactual import without the durability of 
such a machine?

At any rate, what kind of social machine must be in place for an allowance of abortion twenty 
years earlier to 'cause' a reduction in crime today?
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Gmane