Labor & Economy
"Then, one day, some focus group showed that people, particularly older people, react negatively to any connection between Social Security and the word private. For some reason, people like the sound of 'personal accounts' better than they do 'private accounts.' / So the Republicans, with their fabulous ability to march in lockstep, all about-faced and started referring to the privatization of Social Security as 'personal accounts.' This is the new political correctness." [more]
"The United States, having broken Iraq, is not in the process of fixing it. It is merely continuing to break the country and its people by other means, using not only F-16s and Bradleys, but now the less flashy weaponry of WTO and IMF conditions, followed by elections designed to transfer as little power to Iraqis as possible." [more]
Aljazeera reports that member states have decided to maintain the existing official output ceiling of 27 million barrels per day, although they are currently producing about 1.1 million barrels more than that figure. [more]
The meeting comes in the wake of downward pressure on oil prices which in ten days have lost 17 per cent of their value, the largest collapse in prices since the start of the Iraq war. US light crude eventually settled down $1.52 at $41.46 a barrel, the first time it has broken the $42 floor since late August. [more]
First, the US is, and will remain for some time to come, the world's only superpower. This status is usually accompanied by currency supremacy. [more]
An estimated US$30-50 billion in "hot money," or speculative short-term foreign investments, may have entered China this year. Much of that would have been prompted by speculation that the currency will be revaluated. [more]
Imagine you could write cheques that were accepted as payment but never cashed. That is what it amounts to. If you had been granted that ability, you might take care to hang on to it. America is taking no such care, and may come to regret it. [more]
Washington, in other words, is relying on a soft landing for the dollar. History shows, however, that there is a better than even chance of this process ending in a full-scale crisis, as it did in the mid 1980s, when the weakness of the dollar culminated in the stock market crash of 1987. [more]
"Many of the arguments wedding the war in Iraq with a strategy for neoliberal expansion are not readily convincing. They risk reading causality into tangential relationships. And, in their drive to connect, they overlook important disjunctures between the Bush administration’s foreign policy and the policy preferred by many business elites." [more]
"The most important tools being used by the Bush administration to maintain varying degrees of economic and political control in Iraq are the 100 Orders enacted by L. Paul Bremer, III, head of the now defunct Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) before his departure. ... Bremer also ensured the implementation of the Orders by stacking every Ministry with U.S.-appointed authorities with five-year terms—well into the period of the new, elected government." [more]
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(IHT, Apr 30)
"In just five years, Bush has challenged more than 750 new laws, by far a record for any president, while becoming the first president since Thomas Jefferson to stay so long in office without issuing a veto." [more]
(Interactivist Info Exchange, Jul 26)
"Horizontalism is not an ideology, however, it is a relationship — a way of relating to one another in a directly democratic way while at the same time creating through the process of discovery. What has resulted is the creation of an amazing complex of movements, all linked." [more]
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