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41671 executive pay -- rank: 1000

Jim heartfield wrote: >Marx described a time when the capitalist class was revolutionising the >means of production, organising an objective mass of workers, and >promoting a particualr version of social progress. The character of the >challenge to capitalism was necessarily shaped by its opponents. It does >not follow that the social conflicts of the present are of the same >character. I recognize here on of the LM themes, the capitalists' loss of nerve. There's more than a li ...

Document Size:	5588
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Wed Aug 5 08:29:22 PDT 1998

41672 Labor Law Reform -- rank: 1000

Peter Kilander wrote: >Henwood wrote: >>The more I hear, the more I'm convinced that without communists of various >>sorts, there'd be hardly any "progressive" groups around - unions, tenant >>groups, whatever. The inspiring taxi workers strike in New York was >>organized in large part by a small group of mainly Indian Marxists, and I'm >>told that Maoists of various sorts figure prominently in Chicano/a >>organizations in the U.S. There was a thr ...

Document Size:	7426
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Wed Aug 5 07:42:48 PDT 1998

41673 Jonesing for the Dow -- rank: 1000

Jordan Hayes wrote: >Be careful, last time Doug called a top, the DJIA surged another >thousand points. But if you're so sure: wanna buy a put? Jordan, I thought I'd been careful not to call a top since I embarrassed myself in late 1987/early 1988. I have said that recent valuations have historically been associated with steeply negative returns, but I've always embedded this in a caveat that overvalued markets can always get more so before they get less so. In fact, I got an email a few ...

Document Size:	5206
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Tue Aug 4 16:05:16 PDT 1998

41674 Jonesing for the Dow -- rank: 1000

Dennis R Redmond wrote: >And if you're really, really into apocalyptic scenarios, check out Steven >Roach's article "US: The Great American Bubble" over at >http://www.ms.com/gef.html (Morgan Stanley's self-styled Global Economic >Forum). Happy bubbling! Interesting. Roach has been saying similar things for a while, but nobody's been listening. Anyway, he makes a great deal out of revisions to the U.S. GDP accounts that show income growth from 1995-7 was actually lower than ...

Document Size:	6208
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Tue Aug 4 15:56:43 PDT 1998

41675 great expectations -- rank: 1000

pms wrote: >doug, humor my ignorance. compare and contrast class demands and fairness >please. What I meant was that calls for "fairness" can reduce to notions of a "fair" wage and a "fair" profit, which see virtue in balance, and which treat profits as a return to capital as analagous to wages as a return to labor. When in my very old-fashioned book, profit originates in uncompensated labor, meaning that there is no such thing as a fair profit, and that the p ...

Document Size:	4941
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Tue Aug 4 15:28:54 PDT 1998

41676 economists are corrupt -- rank: 1000

[Further proof of Jim O'Connor's dictum that economics is a criminal enterprise...] "How Tempting is Corruption? - More Bad News About Economists" BY: BJORN FRANK University of Hohenheim GUNTHER G. SCHULZE University of Konstanz SSRN Electronic Document Delivery: http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?abstract_id=100968 Paper ID: Working Paper Number: 164/1998 Date: April 1998 Contact: Gunther G. Schulze E-Mail: MAILTO:guenther.schulze at uni-konstanz.de Postal: University of Konsta ...

Document Size:	6143
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Tue Aug 4 15:24:41 PDT 1998

41677 Motown bonds -- rank: 1000

Michael Perelman wrote: >Wasn't David Bowie the first to do this? Yes, he was. There's a collection of clips on this and related securitization schemes at <http://www.fahnestocksas.com/>. Doug

Document Size:	4552
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Tue Aug 4 14:23:53 PDT 1998

41678 Zizek -- rank: 1000

Mathew Forstater wrote: >Is the Zizek piece available in its entirety on the web? -Mat Not that I know of. Those excerpts came courtesy of my lovely new scanner. Doug

Document Size:	4406
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Tue Aug 4 11:56:43 PDT 1998

41679 Labor Law Reform -- rank: 1000

Charles Brown wrote: >There is no >doubt that Communists were prominent and >important in founding the UAW and leading >it until the Reuther purged. The more I hear, the more I'm convinced that without communists of various sorts, there'd be hardly any "progressive" groups around - unions, tenant groups, whatever. The inspiring taxi workers strike in New York was organized in large part by a small group of mainly Indian Marxists, and I'm told that Maoists of various sorts f ...

Document Size:	5075
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Tue Aug 4 11:37:14 PDT 1998

41680 executive pay -- rank: 1000

Carl Remick wrote: >Re Jessica's observation: "I don't believe there is no class >consciousness; in fact I think class consicousness is growing." > >I don't know whether this squares with the idea of rising class >conciousness, per se, but there certainly is rising envy and resentment >about windfall gains in today's casino economy, even among winners. See >today's Wall Street Journal (headline and subheds): "Amid Economic >Boom, Many of the 'Haves' Envy ...

Document Size:	7874
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Tue Aug 4 10:45:17 PDT 1998

41681 Motown bonds -- rank: 1000

They're not artists, they're assets with predictable cash flow! Doug ---- Financial Times, August 4, 1998 MOTOWN WRITERS ISSUE $30M BOND AGAINST ROYALTIES By Alice Rawsthom and Jeremy Grant ....................................................... Holland Dozier Holland, the veteran songwriters who cowrote scores of classic Motown hits for The Supremes, Marvin Gaye, and The Temptations, have raised $30m by jointly issuing a bond against their future royalties. Other composers also plan to tap into ...

Document Size:	7360
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Tue Aug 4 10:31:26 PDT 1998

41682 UFW struggle -- rank: 1000

alec ramsdell wrote: >I remember hearing that at one point Pete Wilson suggested the >possibility of granting green cards under the condition that the new >immigrants only work in the fields. Does anyone know about this? Speaking of which, I heard a year or two ago that Pete Wilson was urging that the U.S. shift from a geographical concept of citizenship (if you're here, you have some right to become one) to a blood concept (it's a matter of ancestry). This was being cheered by the pal ...

Document Size:	5012
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Tue Aug 4 10:05:11 PDT 1998

41683 Slavoj sez... -- rank: 1000

[from Slavoj Zizek, "A Leftist Plea for 'Eurocenrism,'" Critical Inquiry, 24(4), Summer 1998] Today, however, we are dealing with another form of the denegation of the political, postmodern postpolitics, which no longer merely represses the political, trying to contain it and to pacify the returns of the repressed, but much more effectively forecloses it, so that the postmodern forms of ethnic violence, with their irrational, excessive character, are no longer simple returns of the re ...

Document Size:	8444
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sun Aug 2 21:53:38 PDT 1998

41684 Privatization Pep Rally -- rank: 1000

Max Sawicky wrote: >While I share your jaundiced view of >the stock purchase idea, it should be >noted that state pension funds are >pre-funded in this way and there is >no overarching political-economic issue >that I can see in that context. Hmm, well the KKR buyout funds were legitimated on Wall Street when the Oregon state pension fund kicked in some big money in the early 80s; after that, Henry Kravis had no problem shaking money out of institutional investors. Ten years la ...

Document Size:	5226
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sun Aug 2 11:58:40 PDT 1998

41685 executive pay -- rank: 1000

Jim heartfield wrote: >First, esp. in the UK where this was raised, it is pointed that the >discussion about exec pay is a self-criticism that is entirely generated >from within business and amongst the establishment. There are no horny- >handed sons of toil battering on the board room door demanding that the >books be opened. Instead it is almost entirely a discussion arising out >of business' own lack of confidence in itself. I don't hear that here, but Americans rarely suffe ...

Document Size:	6047
Author:	Doug Henwood
Date:	Sun Aug 2 11:47:39 PDT 1998