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36811 Any comments? -- rank: 1000

Brad De Long wrote: >Get rid of the IMF and the World Bank, and "structural adjustment" >becomes not gentler but harsher, financial crises become not less >but more frequent, and not shallower but deeper... What evidence do you have for that? I've read papers from the IMF and BIS claiming that financial crises have been more frequent and more severe in the last 2-3 decades than they were 100 years earlier. First World-Third World income gaps continue to widen, and much of the ...

Document Size:	5082
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Mon Apr 10 07:57:29 PDT 2000

36812 Money creation -- rank: 1000

Enrique Diaz-Alvarez wrote: >Doug Noland makes a good argument that money market funds have become >money creators not subject to reserve requirements. The crux of the >argument is that people regard money market investments as both >stores of value and media of exchange, just like checking accounts. >Deposits on money markets can then be re-lent without keeping reserves, >and as long as borrowers deposit them on other money market accounts, >the multiplier is, in principle, ...

Document Size:	17704
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Mon Apr 10 07:54:37 PDT 2000

36813 Sowing Dragons -- rank: 1000

Brad De Long wrote: >And the big question is: Why do developmental states work so well in >East Asia and western Europe, and appear to work so badly (India, >Argentina, et cetera) elsewhere? Alice Amsden said that the Asian states were not afraid of disciplining capital, while the LatAm ones were. As I remember her argument, the Korean ruling class was very weak in the 1950s, and there was no corrupt quasi-feudal landowner class plugged into the global hierachy. So the state was able to ...

Document Size:	4887
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Mon Apr 10 07:17:06 PDT 2000

36814 Council of Canadians -- rank: 1000

Michael Pollak wrote: >On Fri, 7 Apr 2000, Doug Henwood wrote: > >> Yeah, there are some (post)Keynesians who think that credit is almost >> infinitely elastic - that loans make deposits ad infinitum, >> essentially. That's distinctly a minority view. > >Just out of curiousity, where could I find their justifications for this >argument in summary form? Check out the writings of Basil Moore. Doug

Document Size:	4862
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Mon Apr 10 07:11:15 PDT 2000

36815 Dragons in Distress (was Re: Sowing Dragons) -- rank: 1000

Stephen E Philion wrote: >Just a short note. Bello's book was an important contribution in the early >90's to exposing the price paid for the NIC 'miracles'. However, it tends >to fall way short in terms of analysis. I like Bello's work, but as I recall, Dragons In Distress really overstated the bearish case - it was as if East Asian/NIC growth was all an illusion. Yes it came at a high social and environmental cost, but it wasn't all an illusion. And he was about 7 years ahead of time ...

Document Size:	5344
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Mon Apr 10 07:04:07 PDT 2000

36816 Council of Canadians - credit question -- rank: 1000

D.L wrote: > If not through credit, how does the money supply grow? Money arises in exchange. Certainly there's an extension of credit involved, but there has to be some real sector involvement or the money is going to be worthless. Central bank extensions of credit without any offsetting expansion in productive capacity will be inflationary. Sometimes that appears as a rising CPI; sometimes as a wacky stockmarket. Doug

Document Size:	4960
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Mon Apr 10 06:58:27 PDT 2000

36817 WSJ on A16 -- rank: 1000

Max B. Sawicky wrote: >There's another point of the labor union argument I don't understand, >which that "if we let in China, it will be impossible to ever have a >working labor clause." There are already 100 third world authoritarian >governments in the WTO representing 2 billion people. Why would it be >easier to get them to abide by a labor clause than 1 authoritarian >government that rules over 1 billion people? Especially one that's got a >relatively tight ...

Document Size:	5852
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Mon Apr 10 06:47:26 PDT 2000

36818 Money creation -- rank: 1000

Enrique Diaz-Alvarez wrote: >In any case, it seems to me that the difference between creating money and >creating money in $250 increments only is a fairly minor detail, don't you >think? How do MM funds create money? You deposit $1,000, the fund buys commercial paper and CDs and T-bills. The issuers of those instruments either invest it in real activity or re-lend it to someone who might. Where's the ex nihilo part? Doug

Document Size:	4753
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Mon Apr 10 06:13:24 PDT 2000

36819 connections -- rank: 1000

A PS to my previous post, about the living wage/police brutality hookup at Johns Hopkins. Last night, I spoke at a fundraiser for the NYC Direct Action Network. There were many spirited and militant attendees. One woman was wearing a shirt that bore the slogan, "Fuck That Weak Shit," which is now a motto I'm applying to many things - like the "reform the Bank/IMF/WTO" position, as opposed to the shut-'em-down position. Anyway, the other speakers and most of the audience were ...

Document Size:	5138
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sun Apr 9 08:50:39 PDT 2000

36820 WSJ on A16 -- rank: 1000

Art McGee wrote: > >2. Ours is not the only, nor the primary movement in this >>country. We have to learn to be a little more humble than >>Seattle. When we characterize our movement as the main one >>in the country, (and sometimes the only) we do diservice to >>movements of people of color such as the police brutality >>movement, the immigration movement, the affirmative action >>movement etc. > >Amen. I would like to point out that the above men ...

Document Size:	5566
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sun Apr 9 08:40:00 PDT 2000

36821 question #2: intellectuals on gov't payroll? orwell? -- rank: 1000

[Here's the Orwell passage from Frances Stonor Saunders' The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the Wolrd of Arts and Letters. She should be on my radio show next Thursday if BT fixes her phone in time.] Alsop had Joined Wisner's OPC at the same time as Finis Farr, a writer with Hollywood connections who had worked with John O'Hara. Recruited to the Psychological Warfare Workshop, Alsop and Farr were run by Howard Hunt, a former OSS-er whose taste for black propaganda (he later said he 'thought blac ...

Document Size:	22656
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sat Apr 8 12:39:45 PDT 2000

36822 Greenspan IQ query -- rank: 1000

Rakesh Bhandari wrote: >Yes, Gspan is trying to avoid a coming crisis of underproduction of surplus >value, imperfect valorization of that mountain of capital. He is openly >concerned whether this rapid rate of accumulation which given some upward >pressure on OCC means enormous increase in amount of constant capital >needs to be slowed down before that swollen mass of accumulated machinery >and productive capacity will be idled due to shortage of workers. Not a "shortage ...

Document Size:	5181
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sat Apr 8 10:33:33 PDT 2000

36823 indpendent politix gabfest -- rank: 1000

At 5:27 PM -0400 4/7/00, msifry at publicampaign.org wrote: >Independent Politics and Third Parties: >Is the Moment Ripe? > >Daniel Cantor >executive director, Working Families Party > >Angelo Falcon, director, Institute for Puerto Rican Policy > >Christopher Hitchens >columnist, The Nation > >Arianna Huffington >author, "How to Overthrow the Government" > >Frances Fox Piven >co-author, "Why Americans Don't Vote" > >Adolph ...

Document Size:	5855
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sat Apr 8 10:23:53 PDT 2000

36824 campus update -- rank: 1000

[from Sam Smith's Progressive Review] UNITED STUDENT LABOR ACTION COALITION, WESLEYAN COLLEGE: At 9:30 last night - after 33 hours of occupying our school's admissions office - Wesleyan students declared victory in our fight for workers' rights on campus. We had been concerned that Initial, the contractor that employs our school's janitors, wouldn't agree to better wages and benefits unless Wesleyan agreed to pay for them. Last night, our president called Initial and told them he would foot the ...

Document Size:	12629
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sat Apr 8 10:21:16 PDT 2000

36825 Klein & radicalism -- rank: 1000

Wojtek Sokolowski wrote: >I see your point & agree with it to an extent. But it is one thing to use >a heuristic model or a metaphor to emphasize a structural problem that may >not be visible to a naked eye, but quite a different one to attack that >problem with specific demands and counterproposals. Well yeah. But to take a specific recent issue or two: there was a lot of anti-Shell activism going on after Nigeria hanged Ken Saro-Wiwa. But what do you do instead? Buy gas from E ...

Document Size:	5318
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Fri Apr 7 13:05:55 PDT 2000