Back in '66 or '67 a full colonel was giving a lecture at some university (probably Berkeley) when a man in an orange cloak (if I remember correctly) rode a bicycle onto the stage, pied him, and rode off. I don't remember more details; I'd forgotten about it until this event. Carrol _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list pen-l@... https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
Could it have been General Waste More Land or General Hershey Bar? They were a couple of characters who frolicked at peace rallies in the Bay Area as well as Los Angeles and San Diego with tens of plastic toy weapons on their shoulders and hats dressed in military garb and carrying newspapers with outrageous headlines like "Pentagon to Build Military Bases every 10 Miles". True folk heroes, they. Dan On Apr 30, 2008, at 6:41 PM, Carrol Cox wrote: > Back in '66 or '67 a full colonel was giving a lecture at some > university (probably Berkeley) when a man in an orange cloak (if I > remember correctly) rode a bicycle onto the stage, pied him, and rode > off. I don't remember more details; I'd forgotten about it until this > event. > > Carrol > > _______________________________________________ > pen-l mailing list > pen-l@... > https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l http://www.coolhanduke.com http://www.sonicbids.com/epk/epk.asp?epk_id=62070 _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list(Continue reading)
Michael Perelman wrote: > > I have only read a hundred pages of Naomi Klein's shocked doctrine, but I thought > that it was a very valuable work so far. It should not be judged either as an work > of economic history as an all-encompassing theory of capitalism. > > Even so, pointing out the commonality between New Orleans, Chile, and Iraq was very > valuable. Making such a point does not exclude a certain degree of voluntarism > associated with capitalism. Rather, it exposes an unseemly side of capitalism that > is not frequently discussed. There were a number of flashy books on imperialism in the late '60s (books I can't even remember now) that I read eagerly as I was just getting into politics. Perhaps Klein (regardless of who in this debate is correct) will be doing that for many today. Most people who stick around do more reading of more analytic material as they become more involved. I don't share either Doug's _or_ Patrick's faith in books moving people who are not already in motion, but people who are just starting need sanitary literature (read once and dispose). Carrol _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list pen-l@... https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
troy cochrane wrote: > Has investment in unconventional oil sources - oilsands and shale oil - increased over this period? I don't know those details, but I cannot help but think that capitalists do respond to the profit incentive. When a journalist writes that... > Higher prices have done little to suppress global demand or attract new production, and the > resulting mismatch has sent oil prices ever higher." ... my intuition tells me that, perhaps, that's a bit too careless. Even NYT journalists can write stupid things (often). It goes against what seems kind of obvious to me. First off, investment is the most volatile component in the net output of an industry. So, to see where an industry or market is going, you need to look at investment over longer periods of time or capacity levels (stocks rather than annual flows). I also understand that although in the long run (if we're not all dead) supply and demand in virtually any market will be elastic, in the short run both global energy supply and demand may be highly inelastic. That makes sense to me. Much in the production and consumption of energy is dependent on specific technologies, i.e. there are huge sunk costs that cheapen the production/consumption status quo compared to the alternative. Fair enough. Leave aside for the moment the huge superstructure of derivatives built upon oil. All those financial assets are, well, financial(Continue reading)
From Thursday's Globe and Mail
May 1, 2008 at 1:09 AM EDT
TOKYO — If you want a pep talk about the Japanese economy, don't go see Atsushi Saito.
The head of the Tokyo Stock Exchange doesn't hold back when a Canadian visitor comes by his office expecting a simple rundown on the Japanese markets. Japan, he says, is walking toward the edge of a cliff. Unless it changes direction, the world's second-biggest economy faces financial ruin.
In an hour-long interview, Mr. Saito painted a grim picture of a country with a crushing national debt, a diminished stock market, a shrinking, aging work force and a ruling class too blinkered to learn from its mistakes.
Mr. Saito worked on Wall Street in the 1970s and remembers when New York faced bankruptcy. “We are in the same situation,” he said. “We are the City of New York.”
The difference is that New York had the U.S. government, which, after first refusing, helped rescue it from bankruptcy. “We don't have any Washington,” he said. So unless something changes, “we will have to sell our country to someone else.”
Mr. Saito's comments come at a time when Japan's economy has been enjoying a modest rebound after years of trouble, growing by about 2 per cent a year for four years. But in its twice-yearly forecast Wednesday, the Bank of Japan lowered its growth forecast to 1.5 per cent for the year ending next March.
Mr. Saito said Japan's long-term problems are severe. The markets he presides over as president of the Tokyo exchange mirror the fall in Japan's fortunes, he said.
At the peak of Japan's boom years in the 1980s, he recalled, the combined worth of the stocks on the Tokyo exchange was $6-trillion (U.S.). The figure for the New York exchange was 30 per cent lower.
Today, Tokyo's market capitalization is about $4-trillion and New York's is five times that. China's stocks, meanwhile, are worth 150 times what they were in 1989. Combining the markets in Shanghai, Shenzhen and Hong Kong, he said, the value of the Chinese markets now exceeds Japan's, still rated second in the world by market capitalization.
“Our market has really lost its position in the world,” he said, reclining in a brown leather chair in his spacious office in the fortress-like exchange building. “This is a kind of warning to Japan from abroad.”
In the industrialized world, only Italy's stock market performed worse than Japan's last year.
A second problem, he said, is Japan's immense national debt, which has climbed to 11/2 times its gross domestic product, the highest rate for an industrialized country. Throughout the “lost decade” that followed its 1989 market crash, Japan used floods of public money to try to spend its way back to economic health.
It has funded that debt partly by issuing bonds. In the next 30 years, Mr. Saito said, the government will somehow have to redeem $5.7-trillion worth of those bonds, a sum greater than Japan's current annual GDP.
“And we have to do this with an aging society and a shrinking work force,” he said. “How can we really redeem this debt – unless we raise productivity and economic growth.”
To do that, he said, Japan's conservative-minded business and political leaders will have to open the country to the world as never before, taking down many of the barriers to competition and investment that have made it what he called the “Galapagos of the world” – an isolated economic ecosystem.
Japan, he noted, has the world's most advanced cellphones, capable of delivering TV shows and paying for things at stores. But because they are on the unique Japanese protocol, incompatible with the rest of the world's, Japan has not been able to sell them abroad, missing out on the explosive growth in cellphone use in neighbouring China and other emerging economies.
“We should open the door,” he said. “We need to be much more internationalized.”
Japan's accepts a pathetic amount of foreign investment, he noted – 2.5 per cent of gross domestic product as of 2006, compared with 47 per cent for Britain or 33 per cent for France.
Such views are unpopular among Japanese nationalists and the powerful anti-reform elements of the long-ruling Liberal Democratic Party. Mr. Saito said they dismiss him as “that noisy guy.”
They say to him: “You always side with foreigners. Are you really Japanese?” he said.
But he insists he is a fierce patriot who is only trying to head off a catastrophe by speaking up. During New York's bankruptcy crisis, he remembers seeing people lining up on the street to get their money back on city bonds. The sight made a deep impression.
“Unless we open the door, unless we co-operate with foreign friends, we will repeat the history of the City of New York,” said Mr. Saito (pronounced sigh-toe), a genial man with a broad face and a wave of grey-white hair. “Our sons or grandsons will face disaster.”
Mr. Saito said that, with good pensions and health care and a still-high standard of living, Japanese have been protected from the realities of their country's economic troubles. “We are isolating ourselves from the problem. But the reality is that we are standing on junk paper: debt.”
He said he is dismayed that many Japanese leaders still talk as if Japan was No. 1, as it seemed to be back in the 1980s.
“I remember the same sort of talk before the war: ‘We are No. 1,'” he said, referring to the hubris of Japan's leaders in the runup to the attack on Pearl Harbour. “We haven't learned anything.”
Mr. Saito was appointed president of Tokyo Stock Exchange Inc. last June. A former vice-president of Nomura Securities Co., he was fresh off a tough assignment as head of the state-owned Industrial Revitalization Corp. of Japan, set up to help restructure troubled Japanese companies.
He is 69, well past retirement age, and he said retired friends are always urging him to come out and play golf on weekdays. He said he feels obliged to stay at his post, working for reform despite the taunts of those who dismiss him as a servant of foreigners.
“I don't care,” he said. “I don't have long to live and I want to do this for my country.”
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> Has investment in unconventional oil sources - oilsands and shale oil - increased over this period?
Julio Huato:
"I don't know those details, but I cannot help but think that
capitalists do respond to the profit incentive."
I think that's a given. But how will they respond? Their response will be far more complex than simply increasing productive capacity. If they are increasing productive capacity at a faster rate with the increase in prices then perhaps it indicates that they feel the global production peak in conventional oil is nigh. If their response is other than that - lobbying to prevent increased royalties, marketing overdrive to slow down growing consumer resentment, etc. - then they may recognize the price increase as a bubble tha
t should be milked while it lasts. If a bubble encourages excessively quick investment in production of unconventional sources then they'll undermine future profits when the bubble
bursts.
Julio Huato <juliohuato-Re5JQEeQqe8AvxtiuMwx3w@public.gmane.org> wrote:
troy cochrane wrote:
> Has investment in unconventional oil sources - oilsands and shale oil - increased over this period?
I don't know those details, but I cannot help but think that
capitalists do respond to the profit incentive.
When a journalist writes that...
> Higher prices have done little to suppress global demand or attract new production, and the
> resulting mismatch has sent oil prices ever higher."
... my intuition tells me that, perhaps, that's a bit too careless.
Even NYT journalists can write stupid things (often). It goes against
what seems kind of obvious to me.
First off, investment is the most volatile component in the net output
of an industry. So, to see where an industry or market is going, you
need to look at investment over longer periods of time or capacity
levels (stocks rather than annual flows). I also understand that
although in the long run (if we're not all dead) supply and demand in
virtually any market will be elastic, in the short run both global
energy supply and demand may be highly inelastic. That makes sense to
me. Much in the production and consumption of energy is dependent on
specific technologies, i.e. there are huge sunk costs that cheapen the
production/consumption status quo compared to the alternative. Fair
enough.
Leave aside for the moment the huge superstructure of derivatives
built upon oil. All those financial assets are, well, financial
assets. They behave as such. But leave them aside for now. Thi nk of
the underlying alone (oil). Crude oil is a commodity that markets
treat (trade) as an asset -- i.e. as a store of value. Oil storage
costs are not negligible, but largely you may store it by simply not
extracting it. Oil is not perishable. That means that the primary
owner can just sit and wait if the price is expected to go up and pump
it out as quickly as possible if otherwise. That's aside from
oligopoly quotas, etc. Just plain trying to take advantage of
momentum. Because asset prices are understandably volatile and are
time-serially correlated. Everything that affects the discount rates
(change in base interest rates, changes in liquidity preference,
change in perceived risk, inflation shifts, currency depreciation, you
name it) will buffet those prices. Now add the derivative markets.
Futures prices are an element in the present value of oil. Even if
you don't believe that futures prices are unbiased estimato rs of the
future (note the singular here) prices of oil, that doesn't mean that
people will ignore them. That's true under certain conditions, but
those conditions are not very realistic. Anyway, conclusion: Oil
bubbles are to be expected. As are panics and long periods of
"irrationally" depressed prices.
That's just logic. Now, these are not things to just speculate about.
One needs to measure them. Measuring them though is tricky. It
requires expertise that I lack. So I defer to the experts. For what
I know, the DOE publishes short-term outlooks of the energy markets
that tend to be in the ballpark. The people that put together those
reports are perhaps among the most knowledgeable in the field and they
tend to be rather careful. Their diagnosis of the current state of
oil markets (latest report released on 4/8/2008) doesn't suggest to me
anything like peak oil:
> The global oil market remains fundamenta lly
> tight entering the second quarter, despite
> a slowdown in U.S. oil consumption and growing
> risks to global economic growth. *The
> combination of rising world oil consumption
> and low surplus production capacity is putting
> upward pressure on oil prices.* *The flow of
> investment money into commodities has
> contributed to crude oil price volatility.*
> Inventories are improving in the Organization
> for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD)
> countries, but given the lack of surplus
> capacity and geopolitical concerns in Nigeria,
> Venezuela, and Iraq, a higher level of
> commercial inventories is desirable. The
> magnitude, breadth, and duration of any global
> economic slowdown will certainly influence
> market conditions over the near term. The
> increase in non-Organization of the Petroleum
> Exporting Countries (OPEC) production in the
> second half of the year, however, is expected
> to contribute to increases in OPEC surplus
> crude oil production capacity and ease upward
> price pressures toward the end of the year
Now, let's lay out some basic facts to get a sense of where things may
go. Currently, the U.S. produces 10% of the world oil output.
(Canada a bit less than 4%, Mexico a bit more than 4%.) According to
the DOE, the U.S. is expected to increase its output by 3.3% in the
coming year and much more in 2010. (Canada will expand output faster
and Mexico, well, is expected to have a lower output because the gov't
has run down reserves and capacity to starve the beast and justify the
privatization of PEMEX. That's the main political fight right now in
Mexico.)
Due to the geopolitical situation in the Gulf region and Latin America
(e.g. Iraq mess, quotas, etc.), OPEC -- which produces 42% of global
oil output -- is expected to keep its levels about flat. The countries
formerly known as the Soviet Union that produce already 15%+ of global
oil output will expand much faster. So will China's output, which
already is more than Mexico's. Aside from Mexico, of the relatively
big producers, the North Sea countries (mainly Norway and the UK),
which altogether produce over 5% of global output, are the only ones
with an expected decline in absolute output in the near future.
In consumption, the U.S. takes almost 1/4, Europe 18%, and Asia almost
20% (China 9% of that). In the U.S., consumption is expected to
decline or be flat in the next 2 years. Canada flat. Europe flat.
Only China and other relatively decoupled economies rich in natural
resources will keep pulling demand up. For how long? The prices of
oil and other commodities will be a key factor, as will the global
macroeconomy.
Finally, anecdotal evidence suggests to me that there's be en a recent
wave of massive investment in oil prospecting and extraction.
Refining has lagged, perhaps. For example, rather recently Brazil
found large reserves of oil in the deep waters of its continental
platform. How did they find that oil without investment? Another
example: Venezuela, which is as disciplined an OPEC quota hawk as
there is, has been trying to have its dense Orinoco oil reserves duly
recognized and it's also been inviting foreign investment to extract
and process it. I imagine there's some investment going on there.
Finally, check the existing figures on FDI into the U.S. oil industry.
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This is the tenth anniversary of the Marxism mailing list (also known as Marxmail, the name of the accompanying website http://www.marxmail.org/) that was launched on May 1, 2008. It started off with about sixty subscribers (it now numbers 1103) who were fleeing the Marxism list that preceded it, which had been hijacked by supporters of the Shining Path in Peru, including one Adolfo Olaechea. Adolfo and his co-thinkers soon lost interest in the mailing list and went on to other projects. Adolfo, bless his soul, successfully defended himself recently against trumped up charges of terrorism in Peru and continues to rally people around the Maoist banner. With all due respect to the Maoist left, it was not the kind of political culture that lent itself to a free and open exchange of ideas. After the Maoist comrades had seized the moderator’s reins, they began expelling people left and right—yours truly was the first to go. Ironically, I had written a defense of the Shining Path a few months before I was booted.(http://www.columbia.edu/~lnp3/mydocs/indian/sendero.htm) That did not save me from being punished as a “Trotskyite”. Those stormy days of 1998 seem like a century ago, while my genuine Trotskyist past, from 1967 to 1978 now seems like a millennium ago. History marches on, to use a cliché. The Marxism list now has 1103 subscribers. I serve as moderator and Les Schaffer serves as technical moderator. I have had a long and fruitful collaboration with Les whose solid grasp of subscribers’ psychologies, including my own, helps to keep the list on an even keel. To a large extent, my ideas about how to build a non-sectarian and non-dogmatic left are reflected in the way I moderate the list. Most of all, this involves a firm hand when it comes to any attempts to divide the list between 'Bolsheviks' and 'Mensheviks'. Since Internet mailing lists tend to operate as pressure cookers to begin with, the worst thing for a Marxism mailing list would be to artificially raise the temperature. Labeling people as “revisionists” or “reformists” is an invitation to the kinds of flame wars that destroyed the mailing lists that preceded Marxmail. While the list does not have nearly as many female subscribers that it needs, the global representation is pretty good—including many subscribers from the Third World. On a typical day, there will be posts from subscribers in Argentina, Australia, Canada, Colombia, Germany, and Great Britain. The political representation is also pretty good, with subscribers reflecting Trotskyist, Communist, state capitalist, and syndicalist traditions. The mailing list has grown by about 100 new subscribers per year and I expect that it will continue at this rate unless there is a qualitative change in the political situation. If there was a radicalization as deep as that of 1968 (another anniversary now being celebrated) I can easily imagine adding 3 or 4 hundred subscribers per year. Given the economic crisis we are now entering, as well as the prospect of continuing imperialist war and environmental degradation, that could be in the cards. Nearly 40 years ago, the Trotskyist sect that I belonged to embarked on a major infrastructure expansion campaign in anticipation of the same kind of future radicalization. Members gave millions of dollars to purchase an office building near the Hudson River and an expensive Web Press, which prints on continuous rolls of paper. The offices were seen as necessary to administer an explosive growth in membership and the Web Press would allow the massive circulation of party organs as the radicalization deepened. Although there were opportunities for the group after the 60s radicalization came to an end, they did not understand how to take advantage of them. Instead of growing, they shrank. The building and all the contents, including the Web Press, were sold a couple of years ago. Although there will obviously always be a need for “dead tree” media such as books and newspapers, the Internet—which is a Web Press after a fashion—is as geared to our epoch as the Gutenberg press was geared to the epoch of peasant revolts. I like to think of the Marxism mailing list as the same kind of investment in infrastructure as the SWP’s office building and Web Press, even though it costs very little. In the coming years and decades, even after my ashes have been scattered in the Hudson River, Marxmail will enable revolutionaries worldwide to exchange information and debate ideas all through the auspices of a technology that originated in the American military’s research into how state power could be maintained after a nuclear war! Talk about contradictions… The Marxism list remains grateful to the support of Professor Hans Ehrbar of the University of Utah Economics department, one of the few schools in the country that allows scholarly critiques of the capitalist system to be mounted. Our mailing list operates on a computer that Hans donated and his technical support, along with Les’s, allows our communications to run smoothly. I would also wish our comrade Doug Henwood well, whose LBO-Talk mailing list was launched on the very same day as Marxmail. (http://www.leftbusinessobserver.com/lbo-talk.html) Doug was a survivor of the early wild and woolly days of Marxism mailing lists on the Internet as well as senseless provocations from your moderator before I (and Doug) had reached our current Zen-like state of equanimity. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list pen-l@... https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
troy cochrane wrote: > I think that's a given. But how will they respond? Their response will be > far more complex than simply increasing productive capacity. If they are > increasing productive capacity at a faster rate with the increase in prices > then perhaps it indicates that they feel the global production peak in > conventional oil is nigh. If their response is other than that - lobbying to > prevent increased royalties, marketing overdrive to slow down growing > consumer resentment, etc. - then they may recognize the price increase > as a bubble tha t should be milked while it lasts. If a bubble encourages > excessively quick investment in production of unconventional sources > then they'll undermine future profits when the bubble bursts. I really don't get this distinction. It may make sense for OPEC members -- or even non-OPEC members where private interests are somewhat subordinated to state policy (e.g. Russia, China, Mexico). Other large producers (e.g. the U.S., Canada, Norway, Britain), where private interests dominate, have no clear reason to care about "undermining future profits." They are not members of a co-op of oil producers. Actually, if they produce more, they get more profits. For an individual capitalist, the end of the world is not "peak oil" but going broke. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list pen-l@... https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
Greetings Economists, On May 1, 2008, at 7:34 AM, Louis Proyect wrote: > lthough there will obviously always be a need for “dead tree” media > such as books and newspapers, the Internet—which is a Web Press > after a fashion—is as geared to our epoch as the Gutenberg press was > geared to the epoch of peasant revolts. Doyle; Congratulations. I learned a lot while on the list. As I've said before I think lists don't promote collaboration. Social software like Wiki's shape documents with multiple editors. That said where is the technology going? As an organizing tool computing communications has begun a shift in how office work is done. In San Francisco for example working on line has spawned groups of virtual employees to create their own communal work space. This sends a poison dart into the heart of shop floor concepts of organizing workers. And opens many questions about the meaning of organizing. For example the belly of the beast concept of the room in a plant floor to organize does not challenge control of how space is used for the community. We tend to see in the U.S. a cancerous growth of development of the cities that all decry as isolating and wasteful sources of green house gas climate change. If work is detached from location (office and plant based space controlled buildings) as computing allows then the model of space and location that business has imposed would be open to radical organizational methods. Taking the San Francisco example of communal work space controlled by workers, implies that cities, and space are open to class based building processes. This sense of class solidarity reshaping the concentrations of workers with a class basis of social organization implies a sense of the whole of a community. This goes along with globalist methods of climate control. Ending the American suburban sprawl as a class related community alternative is a massive shift in how Marxism would organize itself as an options for workers. One avenue in this development is the rapid rise of multi-core computing, and the efforts to create research in writing such software that really functions in ubiquitous high performance computing available for all to work inside of. Building a whole of working class culture needs the right tools and the right collaboration of community. I propose a radical solution of class problems is location based organizing of work into a whole class based community structure. No more parties, as much as complete integration of everyone into state processes of community function. This means automating connection by language. This attacks the divisions of society into language groups. Preserves small languages to contribute to the whole connection process. And establishes a global definition of group dynamics that overcomes racist and sexist groups dynamics. I think this sort of manifesto can be implemented in a practice that others can be part of so I'm going to evangelize this locally to see if this can be launched in friendly social environments and grown into a new left wing form of organizing. thanks, Doyle saylor_______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list pen-l@... https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
today, I received two messages from listing@... about my participation in two separate listservers (with my other e-mail account). For some very strange reason, neither told me the name of the listserver in question. So I withdrew from both. Is this any way to run a listserver? -- -- Jim Devine / "Segui il tuo corso, e lascia dir le genti." (Go your own way and let people talk.) -- Karl, paraphrasing Dante. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list pen-l@... https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
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