Putin linked to Moscow blasts (guardian) ---------- 189100 euro sclerotics vs dollarland mores ----- in front of the US embassy in A'dam: Ken Nichols to burn U.S. Passport ------ 188143 350 Palestinians condemn Terror attacks on Israeli civilians -------- 5059 (in dutch from DeWaarheid.nu -- in 20 years time Cuba has reduced use of ag. chems. 75% -------  Remember me messin with E rosenstock-huessy? Here are some disgusting samples I am sure have  nothing to do with my visit --------------  lbo-talk -------------  Doug Henwood: Thank you for joining us, Gore Vidal. ------------ JHR Home Page Vol. (Year): No.: Karl Marx: Anti-Semite JAMES B. WHISKER  =++===+++==++++ - ???ally links Putin to Moscow blasts Jonathan Steele and Ian Traynor in Moscow Wednesday March 6, 2002 The Guardian The Russian former media mogul Boris Berezovsky launched his strongest attack yesterday on his one-time friend and now president, Vladimir Putin, accusing him of being linked to the terrorist bombings of apartment buildings that killed about 300 Russians in September 1999. Mr Berezovsky, now living in London, called a press conference to produce a British explosives expert, a French documentary-maker, a former Russian agent of the FSB (successor to the KGB), and a woman who lost her mother in the blasts, to accuse the security service and demand an official inquiry. "I am sure the bombings were organised by the FSB. It's not just speculation. It's a clear conclusion", Mr Berezovsky said yesterday. "I'm not saying Mr Putin gave an order to blow up those buildings. I'm saying that at the least he knew the FSB was involved." Mr Putin, who was named prime minister shortly before the bombings after heading the FSB, blamed the attacks on Chechens and used public outrage to justify sending Russian forces into the rebel republic. Presenting himself as a tough war leader, he won the presidential election in 2000. Mr Berezovsky, who has lost his share in several Russian TV companies since 2000, based his case on the professional nature of the bombings and the large amount of explosives used. He also cited official discrepancies after a foiled blast at a block of flats in Ryazan. A resident alerted the police after seeing three suspicious people unloading bags into a basement a few days after the first explosion in Moscow. The next day the interior minister said the police had defused a timing device after finding explosives in the bags. But when the new FSB chief said the bags contained sugar and had been planted as a drill to test police vigilance, the hunt for suspects was called off. Mr Berezovsky was close to Boris Yeltsin, who was president at the time, and used his TV stations to run a campaign in favour of Mr Putin. Opponents claim his attack on Mr Putin is a personal vendetta after he lost influence. "I didn't raise the matter until recently," he admitted yesterday. "I didn't expect the security services could take part in such a crime." In a bid to pre-empt the allegations, a Moscow official said yesterday that Mr Berezovsky was being investigated for links to Chechen rebels and could be implicated in the murder of a senior Russian police officer in Chechnya. Moscow may demand he be extradited from Britain or request an international arrest warrant for him, Pavel Barkovsky of the prosecutor-general's office told the Interfax news agency. "Berezovsky is trying to present himself as a political fighter and to seek attention by staging acts of political provocation," he added. New evidence indicated that Mr Berezovsky had supplied around $1m (£700,000) to Chechen rebel warlords to buy weaponry, he claimed. Officials say they know who carried out the bombings and maintain they were "Chechen terrorists", but the only two suspects to come to court are non-Chechens. They were acquitted last year. The Russians have already issued a national arrest warrant for Mr Berezovsky in connection with allegations of embezzlement from Aeroflot. ---------- 189100 Bye Bye American Pie: A Confirmation (english) Will Hutton and karlof1 1:23am Sun Jun 30 '02 (Modified on 11:43am Sun Jun 30 '02) article#189100 I'd like to thank Mr. Hutton for printing a piece that gives even greater credibility to the article I wrote Friday describing the likely effects of the current corporate crime wave in the US and on the world. That article can be found at 188942 while Hutton's article is below and at http://www.observer.co.uk/ worldview/story/0,11581,746843,00.html Bye bye American pie Behind the crisis in corporate America is a combination of pernicious Southern conservatism and unadulterated greed, argues Will Hutton. Will Hutton Sunday June 30, 2002 The Observer The US faces a grave economic crisis. The confidence in the balance sheets and reported profitability of American companies has been shattered by an orgy of unprecedented corporate fraud, plunder and malfeasance that has demanded the connivance of its most reputable accounting firms, business leaders and banks. Only last week news broke of the biggest ever accounting fraud in history at WorldCom, to be followed days later of an epic accounting swindle at Xerox. Before them has been a string of others, with Enron the most famous collapse of all. The integrity of the entire system for channelling savings into investment is now in question as is that of corporate America, just as America's debts to foreigners and its own consumers indebtedness have reached unsustainable levels. The country has been living beyond its means and inventing value when none existed. No one can predict with certainty how this will unravel, although the faltering of American consumer confidence and the sell-off of the dollar are already pointers. The dollar is threatening to inherit the sobriquet of 'toilet currency' once borne by the euro. The US can and eventually will recover, but only when it comes to terms with the harshest of realities. That it does not possess a uniquely enterprising economic and financial model. That the scandals now hitting the headlines are not a case of one or two bad apples, but reveal systemic weaknesses in its financial system and methods of corporate governance which need root-and- branch reform. That American business ethics are abysmally low and require the toughest of policing . And that the US, like other economies that have pursued unsustainable and foolhardy policies, must go through a period of painful and difficult adjustment. This is not just a case of companies fudging a billion here or there, as President Bush said in his folksy statement on Friday, and hoping nobody notices, a problem, as he characterises it, of individual ethics rather than systemic deformation. Rather, this is where America's business culture has led, legitimised by the conservative ideological barrage now a generation old which has transformed American public discourse. Everything should and must be pro-market, pro-business and pro-shareholder, a policy platform lubricated by colossal infusions of corporate cash into America's money-dominated political system. Congresswoman Marcy Kaptur, for example, described the abysmally lax 1996 Telecoms Act, deregulating the telecoms industry and the precondition for the current scandals in the industry, lobbied for ferociously by WorldCom in order to unleash market forces, as 'living proof of what unlimited money can do to buy influence in the Congress of the United States'. The truth is that American business has bought the American executive and legislature alike. It is this that makes crafting the right reaction to the crisis so hard. The Bush administration has become so attached to the conservative revolution and its attendant free-market fundamentalism that the change in thinking it must now make threatens to be beyond them, even if its corporate paymasters would allow it. The need is to reregulate, to recognise business lobbying is primarily self-interested and, above all, to insist that successful capitalism is much more sophisticated and complex than simply letting fat cats get fatter and diminishing all forms of worker protection. The US will find its way back, as it has done before, but only when its conservative hegemony and its compromised ideas have been broken. This will be a Herculean task, for the rise in conservatism has deep roots. It is no accident that WorldCom, whose accounting fraud cost $3.8 billion, was based in Mississippi and was a generous contributor to its hard-line conservative senator, Trent Lott, minority leader in the Senate, as Ed Vulliamy reports today. Nor that Enron, whose profits were vastly overstated by accounting fiddles, was based in Texas and whose relationship with George Bush was so close. The states of the Confederacy remain the heartland of the distinct brand of American conservatism that combines Christian, market and America-first fundamentalism to a unique degree, reinforced in the South by a legacy of barely submerged racism. The rise of American conservatism has closely followed the rise in the economic fortunes of the Confederacy, together with its belief in a take-no-prisoners form of capitalism. The new Right thinkers provided the intellectual cover, providing populist slogans calling for 'freedom', accusing all forms of government of being 'coercive' and deriding the social contract as a cause of 'dependency'. It didn't take long before Wall Street joined in, insisting that the companies should serve the interests of their owners first and foremost - the doctrine of maximising 'shareholder value' - and that regulation inhibited 'enterprise'. Bit by bit, the edifice of Roosevelt's New Deal and Johnson's Great Society programme have been dismantled to make 'America great' again. For most of the last decade, the result has seemed impressive, spawning what may only be transient US leadership of the hi-tech revolution. But now we can see the underlying weaknesses. Company directors awarded themselves fabulous share-option schemes and cut corners to manipulate their profits to meet investors' avaricious expectations, so supporting the share price and their own fortunes. The ruses were simple, ranging from booking next year's income as this year's to the sheer fraud, as in the telecoms sector, of falsifying sales altogether. The result was to propel an already fevered stock market to yet more stratospheric and unjustified levels: Wall Street is still valuing American companies more generously that at any time since 1929. The majority of mergers and takeovers in this stock market-dominated economy have proved destructive: few add any value and most lower it. Between 1993 and 2000, Wall Street had brought 3,500 small hi-tech companies to the stock market; even before the dotcom bubble had burst, more than half were trading below their initial offer price or had gone bust. While dividend distributions have doubled as a proportion of profits, investment in the core of American business was troublingly low; the US has less invested capital per employee than France or Germany. Productivity is higher in both (the old East Germany excepted) and growing at least as rapidly. The consequence is America's intractable trade deficit. Great wealth and opportunity have been the privilege of the few. As the scandals unfold, ordinary Americans are left naturally concerned about the integrity of their pensions and the viability of their insurance companies. The structures that support ordinary peoples' lives - free health care, quality education, guarantees of reasonable living standards in old age, sickness or unemployment, housing for the disadvantaged - that Europeans take for granted are conspicuous by their absence. Mainstream America has been told that its threadbare and neglected social contract is the price it must pay for opportunity, liberty and wealth creation. The political reaction could be fierce if the Democrats have the nous, courage and leadership to express citizens' concerns. But the outfall could go further. Britain's political, financial and business classes have been polluted by the same conservative virus. It is not just Lady Thatcher, but Tony Blair and Gordon Brown who have uncritically celebrated America's enterprise culture. Beyond them, many in Europe have wilted before the propaganda offensive and begun to accept that Europe's economic and social model is irredeemably weak and that it should be Americanised. In truth, the task, as I argue in The World We're In, is to develop a distinctive European model of enterprise which takes a more rounded view of what produces organisational success and protects our conception of the social contract and public realm which are central to European civilisation, and which all Europeans, despite their surface differences, hold in common along with the best in the American liberal tradition. As real fears grow that Britain could experience similar problems, our establishment has been quick to point out that we are better regulated along European lines. This notion was decried just a few months ago by many of those same voices as inhibiting our ability to emulate American enterprise. Our 'sclerotic' European-ness may be what saves us. We should be relieved and proud - and build on it. ================ The other thing (english) KD 4:43am Sun Jun 30 '02 comment#189116 The other big thing working on the USA and global economic situation is the global energy crisis. Energy production has been flat for two years, and is about to go into steady decline. Just do a web search for Hubbert Peak. You'll find lots of information. Since industrial economies are entirely dependent upon INCREASING supplies of CHEAP energy, they are in for some very rough going. They may not make it at all. It's not a matter of capitalist versus socialist. Socialist economies were/are industrial economies too. ============== Capitalism is not Fundamentally Sound (english) m. 4:51am Sun Jun 30 '02 comment#189117 Capitalism, in reality, has little to do with a model of free enterprise, and it is only sustained by the hand of a strong state. The conservatives of the last twenty years have only taken a fundamentally unsound system to unprecedented extremes. ============= instant karma (english) dk 6:32am Sun Jun 30 '02 comment#189123 It's a simple matter of their own misdeeds coming to bite them in the ass. Unfortunately, it will probably not be the Kenneth Lays, Bill Clintons and Baby Doc Bushes of the world who suffer. They'll be waving and saying, "Yup, you were right all along -- we're crooks!" as they sail off in their lifeyacht as the rest of us go down with the ship. ============= Don't believe the hype (english) Red neck 11:43am Sun Jun 30 '02 comment#189184 Is reform possible? What if they did implement stern reform? what would that do for the market? It seem that these calls, simple over look the fact that hype is the fundamental element in the new economy. -------------- http://www.indymedia.nl/2002/06/5063.shtml Ken Nichols to burn U.S. Passport Ken Nichols to burn U.S. Passport 28.06.2002 13:33 Ken Nichols, voormalig V.S. marinier en momenteel asielaanvrager in Nederland,zal als symbolische actie op Maandag 1 Juli om 14:00 uur bij het Amerikaans consulaat (museumplein) zijn paspoort verbranden. FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE Subject: To mark the birth of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a former UNITED STATES Marine announces his intent to seek legal representation in order to charge the U.S with War Crimes for Human Experiments during the Gulf War (details below) and Crimes Against Humanity for its use of Depleted Uranium (DU) with absolute knowledge that its use would cause massive birth deformities and death from radiation exposure. Kenneth Nichols is currently seeking political asylum in Holland and will additionally Serve Legal Notice to the U.S. officials of his human right to Self Determination as a final action in renouncing U.S. citizenship. As a symbolic action to affirm his human rights he will Burn his U.S. Passport. For what appears to be the first time in history, a birth citizen of the UNITED STATES is renouncing his citizenship in favor of being Stateless. This action is also in protest of ongoing U.S. policies, specifically the "American Servicemembers Protection Act (ASPA)," the "Patriot Act," and most notably the blatant U.S. hostility and threats against those who support the formation of the ICC. Currently the UNITED STATES is the only Western Democratic nation opposed to the ICC. It stands with China, Israel, Libya, and Iraq, and North Korea in this position. Where: U.S. Consulate in Amsterdam at Museumplein. When: July 1, 2002. 2pm. Press Conference Former U.S. Marine,Kenneth Nichols will make a statement and take questions from all media agents. All Activists and concerned people are hereby invited to attend. Bring signs or material if you like. Contact # Ken Nichols 06 2220 4574 email uksociety@hotmail.com "All peoples have the right of self-determination. By virtue of that right they freely determine their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and cultural development." 2200A (XXI) International Covenant on Civil & Political Rights (ICCPR) geef een korte reaktie op dit artikel -------------------- too bad... 28.06.2002 14:09 "To mark the birth of the International Criminal Court (ICC), a former UNITED STATES Marine announces his intent to seek legal representation in order to charge the U.S with War Crimes for Human Experiments during the Gulf War." I wish you all the best, but the Tribunal will only accept cases about crimes comitted after 1 July 2002. Barry Website: http://battl.nl -------------------- zie 28.06.2002 15:50 Joachim Website: http://www.indymedia.nl/2002/01/1392.shtml --------------- tisniewaar 28.06.2002 23:41 I invite you all to do a counter demo in the name of gently non-polarizing ways that make up . . . individual unisonic evolution . condemning each and all, even the slightest form of pyromania. anyways, good on him what would he do if he was totally free funded and fancied I wonder? gotta be free totally free free as the wind the new zappa dokuzone flick is only days old and nobody goes to see it daar hou je dan ondanks het mooie oppeppertjes bevattende werkje een moedeloosheid aan over. piet ---------------- piet ... 29.06.2002 02:38 ..snot, van de piet gerukt, piet lul? Wat bazel je Piet? Ik begrijp er geen reet van. Sterker nog, niemand begrijpt er een reet van. Je bent een verspilling van eentjes en nulletjes. poet ---------------- a couragous statement 01.07.2002 09:37 a courages statement against American armies warcrimes. as Rosa Luxembourg said: the most revolutionary act is always to speek the truth out loud. good action. deserves support --------------- 5059 (in dutch from DeWaarheid.nu -- in 20 years time Cuba has reduced use of ag. chems. 75% ------ first response: Cuban agriculture is not a choice... 28.06.2002 18:04 Certainly, Cuba is using much less pesticides than before 1990, but at least "waarheid.nu" should know that this is because Organic farming is considered better. With the breakdown of the socialist bloc in 1990, Cuba lost it main source of income, the export of sugar above world market prices. Among others, the country could not afford to import chemicals and pesticides or oil to run the tractors and other machinery. Under these circumstances, Cuba was in fact able to turn her agriculture in organic agriculture and over the years an amazing system of biopesticides and biological pest control. This cannot be regarded highly enough, but it should not be romanticised. First of all, organic agriculture did not stimulate urban agriculture. That was and is still born out of sheer need. And the need to keep pigs in one´s own bathroom (as it is now quite common) is certainly not what one is aiming for. But more important are the current trends in agriculture and agricultural research. Cuba´s approach to development is through technology and science, and their medical research is remarkable. Since several years there are projects under way to develop genetically modified (GM) plants: especially sugar cane, potatoes, papaya, tomatoes, banana and plantain, coffee, citrus fruits etc. (Only tobacco is left out, in order to keep the name of Cuban cigars beyond suspicion.) Internationally GM crops are not in organic agriculture, and most worryingly are the current field tests with herbicide resistant GM sugar cane. The use of herbicides is clearly an option for Cuban farmers and agricultural scientist; it is just the question whether they can afford them. Cuba has a lot of problems, and quite some good approaches to common heath care and food production, and they certainly deserve a clearer view and a better analysis of the situation that waarheid.nu is offering here. For more details see: Cuban Agrobiotechnology: Diverse agenda in times of limited food production. www.biotech-monitor.nl/4207.htm Antje Website: http://www.biotech-monitor.nl/4207.htm ------------------- laajenienaaie 28.06.2002 23:46 net weer een beetje opgefleurd; probeer kwetal taal enzo of probeer hier: http://www.acresusa.com de enige goede reden om eens in wageningen te gaan kijken. meer dan 10 jaargangen in de biep op de haarweg piet Website: http://members.lycos.nl/  vadercats/inhoudsopgave.htm --------------------- - 188143 350 Palestinians condemn Terror attacks on Israeli civilians (english) Memri 9:36am Tue Jun 25 '02 article#188143 On June 19, 2002, the Palestinian daily Al-Quds published a communique regarding Palestinian martyrdom attacks. The communique was signed by 55 prominent Palestinians, among them Sari Nusseibeh and Hanan Ashrawi. Two days later, the communique was reissued with modifications and additional signatures. (Photo: Sari Nusseibeh) Additionally, an English translation was published in The Jerusalem Times (Palestinian Authority), on June 20. The following is the text of both issues of the communiqu as well as reactions of Palestinian public figures:(1) Communique : First Release "A Call:" "Out of our national responsibility, and due to the gravity of the situation the Palestinian people is in, we, the undersigned, wish to hope that those behind the military actions aimed at [harming] citizens in Israel will reconsider [their acts] and cease pushing our youth to carry out these operations, because we do not see them as leading to any results except for increased hatred, enmity, and hostility between the two peoples, deepening the chasm between them, and destroying the possibility of both peoples living alongside each other in peace in two neighboring states." "We maintain that these operations achieve no progress towards the realization of our [national] plan calling for freedom and independence. On the contrary: They increase unity among the enemies of peace on the other side [Israel] and provide excuses for the aggressive government, at the head of which stands Sharon, to continue the cruel and aggressive war he wages against our people [a war] that targets our villages, our cities, our elderly, and our children, as well as our achievements, our hopes, and our national program." "Military operations can be judged to be positive or negative only by the extent to which they realize political goals. Accordingly, there is a need to reconsider these acts, knowing that we do not think that encouraging the reciprocal existential fighting between the two peoples in the holy land will lead to anything except destruction and ruin for all people of this region. We find no logical, human, or political justification for this outcome." "We call on everyone who supports this call to add his signature via fax no. 02-6277166." "The communiqu will be reissued soon." "This communiqu was published with funding provided by the European Union for the popular peace campaign." Communiqu : Second Release with Modifications When the communiqu was republished two days later in Al-Quds, it contained 315 signatories, including Maiys 'Ouda, a 10-year-old girl, former PA minister Ziyad Abu Ziyad, and member of the PLC and head of its political committee, Ziyad Abu Amru. The information regarding the communiqu 's EU funding was removed, and in its place was a note that the signatories' names appeared in the order of their signature. The following announcement was also added: "Needless to say, all the signatories to this communiqu strongly condemn all measures implemented by the Israeli repression against our people, including the policy of incursions, assassinations, and siege, and stress that the occupation is the basis of the tragedy to which our people is subject and that resistance is a right and an obligation."(2) These two changes reflect criticism of the signatories as described below. Criticism I: PLC/Fatah Member Hatem Abd Al-Qader In an interview with the Arab-Israeli weekly Al-Sinara, Palestinian Legislative Council member and Fatah leadership member Hatem Abd Al-Qader stated: "This communiqu is not acceptable to the Fatah movement. It is an unbalanced communiqu because it refers to operations against Israeli citizens but not to crimes being perpetrated by Sharon against the Palestinian people. The [signatories] should have also focused on these crimes. If these operations are terrorist, then what Sharon is carrying out is also terror, and terror cannot be looked at with only one eye." When the interviewer noted that the communiqu did refer to Sharon and the Israeli government's operations in the territories, Abd Al-Qader stated: "I know what was written in the communiqu . It was shown to me, but I refused to sign it. It is true that the communiqu takes a direction in which there is a certain degree of common sense, but it is still unbalanced. We could have [accepted] a communiqu that would set matters in their proper framework. We are completely against the killing of civilians from both sides; neither are we in love with bloodshed. But the question is, how can this cycle be broken? It must be done by stopping the aggression against the Palestinian people." The interviewer proceeded to ask, "What are the conditions for stopping the martyrdom operations?" Abd Al-Qader replied: "Concrete efforts could be invested in stopping these operations if Israel would commit to five things:" "First, it must undertake to stop the aggression against the Palestinian people that is, stop the incursions. Second, it must withdraw from the occupied Palestinian areas. Third, it must lift the siege from the Palestinian people living inside prisons. Fourth, it must release all [Palestinian] prisoners. Fifth, the international community must provide us with guarantees that [we will be able] to actualize our right to maintain resistance in the 1967 areas..." The interviewer then stated: "But President Yasser Arafat issued a communiqu in which he demanded a stop to the operations; he even attacked them." Abd Al-Qader responded: "The ones who carry out these operations are local leaders... Even the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades decisions depend today on the political situation... The Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which is Fatah's military wing, is not subject to a central decision of the political leadership... Arafat has almost no control and the one who bears the responsibility is Israel..."(3) Criticism II: Top Hamas Official Dr. Abd Al-'Aziz Al-Rantisi In another Al-Sinara interview, Dr. Abd Al-'Aziz Al-Rantisi, one of the Hamas heads in the Gaza Strip, was also asked about the communiqu . He said: "We are not preventing anyone from expressing his opinion as he wishes. Most of the communiqu 's signatories have no connection to the resistance and they do not believe at all in the resistance of the Palestinian people... We realize there is disagreement, but we look at the Palestinian street following Tuesday's operation by Hamas and Monday's operation by Fatah in Jerusalem and following other operations, and we realize that as a rule, the Palestinian people supports the resistance, as do the various Palestinian factions..." "The communiqu 's signatories ignored the siege on the Palestinian people, and began to talk about the suffering of the aggressor thus arousing the ire of the Palestinian street... This communiqu was paid for by Europe. Instead of Europe feeding the hungry among the Palestinian people, it funds communiqu s containing political positions that negate the resistance of the Palestinian people."(4) Criticism III: Al-Rantisi on the Hamas Website In an article posted on the Hamas website, Al-Rantisi wrote: "...Why did you not [endorse what] Ted Turner, the founder of CNN network, said when he showed understanding for the martyrdom operations being carried out by Palestinians against the Zionist military machine... Your friend Uri Avneri, of the Zionist Peace Now bloc, was more balanced than you; this raises many question marks regarding the goals of this accursed communiqu ... If Avneri attested that millions support the resistance and Jihad, whom do you represent, Oh [signatories] of the European-supported communiqu ? Why don't you direct your arrows at the real causes of hatred and enmity? Or do you think we must agree to the occupation and its actions?... Oh signatories to the communiqu supported by the Euro I remind you that the Palestinian people is supported by blood."(5) -----------  lbo-talk Delongwinded or short of breath? From: Charles Jannuzi (b_rieux@yahoo.com) Date: Mon Jul 01 2002 - 06:34:02 EDT Previous message: Tahir Wood: "Re: determinism" Messages sorted by: [ date ] [ thread ] [ subject ] [ author ] [ attachment ] Of course the ideological heavyweight for Japan policy in the Clinton administration was the dimwit but prolix Prestowitz (or the even more wordy vanWolferen), but Brad did write about Japan circa 2000 I believe. So let's take a look at this, shall we? It's amazing how quick this pop economics stuff dates, isn't it? Everyday the world is a different place, I'm a changed man, and economics is less useful than the 3-day weather forecasts. http://www.worldlink.co.uk/stories/storyReader$243 >>DO YOUR HOMEWORK Brad DeLong Today, the conventional wisdom is that the American economy is by a wide margin the most successful of the industrial core. . A business cycle expansion of unusual length, the lowest unemployment rate of any major industrial economy, no visible problems with inflation, relatively rapid productivity growth, high stock market values, and technological dominance of the most vibrant and rapidly growing sectors of the economy. << ------------- Or is that of the deindustrialized rotten core? ------------- >>Once again the US is ? as Leon Trotsky wrote more than 70 years ago ? "the furnace where the future is being forged". Politicians, bureaucrats, business executives and intellectuals are pondering how they can, at lowest cost, adopt and adapt the key economic institutions that have underpinned the American economy�fs triumph over the past decade.<< ------------- I suppose so were taxi drivers. Worldcom, Enron, Andersen, GlobalCrossing, Tyco. One institution that I'm made to think of is bankruptcy court. The other is called 'jail'. ------------- >>But little more than a decade ago things were very different. About 15 years ago a joke was making the rounds about three executives ? American, European and Japanese ? facing execution by terrorists and their last requests. The last request of the Japanese executive was to give a lecture on Japanese management techniques. The punchline was the last request of the American executive: to be executed immediately so as not to have to listen to another lecture about Japanese management techniques.<< ------------- See Baudrillard on 9-11 or something? Guess terrorism isn't so funny anymore. Actually, it was always the American business gurus lecturing about said techniques anyway. Not the Japanese. ------------- >>At that time the "triumphalism" was Japanese economic triumphalism. Observers (myself included) looked at Japan�fs extraordinary rate of investment, the high rates of return on investment, the extraordinary competence of Japan�fs export manufacturing sector and projected these trends forward. They, or we, saw the productivity of export manufacturing diffusing through the rest of the Japanese economy, and saw the country gaining the same productivity edge in processors design, software, networks and other highest-tech industries that it had earlier gained in industries like consumer electronics, metallurgy and automobiles.<< ------------- Sorry Brad, but Japan was shut out of developing processors for desktops. They were even forced into strict quotas on quickly commoditized memory chips, which created artificial shortages and a gray market in the US. See the trade agreements inked back in the late 80s. And having been shut out of Europe long enough, Japanese auto manufacturing capacity is significantly owned by non-Japanese. ------------- >>Social solidarity, long-term loyalty, patient capital, a successful developmental state ? these seemed to be powerful virtues worth imitating.<< ------------- Talk about stereotypes. ------------- >> Today, however, the arms of the Japanese developmental state ? the Ministry of International Trade and Industry (MITI) and the Ministry of Finance (MOF) ? are seen as having been unequal to their tasks and unable to grasp Japan�fs situation in the 1990s.<< For one thing, the two ministries never had any solidarity and, along with Post and Telecommunications, spent the better part of the past decade disagreeing about who should do what to whom for what reason. With politicians like Koizumi in his pre PM days conniving and blabbering away. >> Long-term loyalty is now seen as lack of entrepreneurship, patient capital as failure to respond to market signals. Social solidarity is viewed as blocking the economic reforms that would raise the productivity standards of Japan�fs non-export manufacturing sectors.<< I never saw the solidarity here, so I'm not sure what to conclude. I'm not sure you are sure of what you are referring to when you say 'non-export' manufacturing sectors, since a lot of companies Americans know nothing about prop up Japan, Inc. or just compete like mad in Japan (e.g. Suntory against Coca Cola, Kao and Lion against Proctor and Gamble). Some of the leanest, meanest companies I know of in Japan (Kai Razor, Itoen Beverages, House Foods, etc.) compete mostly for the domestic market and never got to benefit from the high profits of an export quota for something to be sold in the US or Europe (like Sony or Toyota did). So I think that this is just anecdote repeated and repeated based on outright lies about the Japanese economy. Of course the outright lies go back to those concocted by the so-called Japan revisionists who at least got read in summary form in the Clinton admin. Basically the way it works is like this: if your bullshit gets printed in a book someone paid good money for, much of its content gets accepted as accurate and factual. >>WATCH AND LEARN The pendulum has swung remarkably far away from Japan over the past decade. But before this happened, both businesses and governments had learned much from the country�fs economic miracle. The lessons about quality control and productive efficiency taught by Japanese manufacturing firms were painful ones, but the Fords, the Siemenses and the Hewlett-Packards learned.<< Uhh, sorry, Ford still sucks. And I'd never buy a HP pc. Too many much better ones to pick from here in Japan. Ford is so stupid it took them 8 years to admit Mazda builds better small car engines than Ford does. Duh. >>And the pendulum will swing back, away from the US economy. The most likely way that this will happen is through a decline ? either rapid and short or slow and prolonged ? in American stock market valuations and in the value of the dollar. Any claims that the historic highs we�fve seen in American stock market values are sustainable rest on a belief that attitudes toward risk have changed, and that the marginal investor now expects a treasury bond-style rate of return from equities. But no one holding Cisco or Yahoo! today does so because they anticipate that they will receive a treasury-bond-style rate of return from their investment.<< No, I guess they wanted to shoot the moon! Some would probably give up a gonad for a bond-like return. >>Substantial portfolio losses on American equities will make decision-makers all over the world allergic to praise of the American economy. An end to the net inflow of capital to the US and a consequent substantial fall in the value of the dollar would significantly reduce the international purchasing power of American investors and companies, and lower their relative weight in the world economy. Such a decline in the dollar value of American equities and in the international value of the dollar would not have to disturb greatly the fundamentals of US production and employment. The Federal Reserve could use its interest-rate tools to shift investment demand from sectors valuable in times of stock-market exuberance to sectors like construction, where investment is profitable when interest rates are low. And a decline in the value of the dollar would eventually generate an export boom. << Something sure looks like it's getting disturbed. I can't wait for the US to try and export more cars to Japan, though. More likely, Daimler-Chrysler is going to move even more Mitsubishi stuff to the US, as is Ford, putting Mazda engines in everything. >>The lessons that the rest of the world economy�fs industrial core should learn from America�fs relative economic success in the 1990s have not yet been thoroughly learned, have not sunk in Only if the Federal Reserve badly misses the mark ? or if a substantial decline in the dollar is accompanied by revelations that America�fs financial institutions have extraordinarily large and unhedged euro, yen and sterling liabilities ? will the American economy face problems of the same magnitude that the Japanese economy faced ? and has so far failed to surmount ? as a result of the end of its bubble economy a decade ago.<< I think some far different 'liabilities' are coming to light. >>But even though an end to the period of irrational stock market exuberance and a high currency value supported by large-scale capital inflows will not ? or need not ? disturb in a significant way the fundamentals of American production and employment, it will bring an end to the eagerness of politicians and executives in other countries to learn from America. Cultural patterns and socio-economic institutions are stubborn things that change only under substantial pressure.<< ------------- Oh yes, the trade mercantalists and neoimperialists in the Clinton administration were stubborn, I agree. ------------- >> And there is a sense in which it would be unfortunate if American economic triumphalism came to an end too soon. For the lessons that the rest of the world economy�fs industrial core should learn from America�fs relative economic success in the 1990s have not yet been thoroughly learned, have not sunk in.<< ------------- I think we are starting to get that sinking feeling, though. ------------- >>What are these lessons ? analogous to the lessons about quality control, productive efficiency and manufacturing organisation learned from Japan more than a decade ago ? that the rest of the industrial core should learn? I see four. First, that governments seeking full employment can ease their task by providing large subsidies to businesses that hire relatively unskilled, low-wage workers. The expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit ? a programme that directly boosts the wages of the working poor by having the government pay a substantial share ? in the US in the 1990s appears to have been a significant policy success. It has paid dividends not just in a lowered unemployment rate but a less unequal after-tax distribution of income.<< ------------- Funny I don't remember this coming up in the discussion on employment on LBOT recently. ------------- >>Second, that there is more room for expansionary monetary policy to lower unemployment without raising inflation than anyone had believed.<< Sure is, especially if you can use a cheap dollar and artificially high prices in steel and oil to prevent deflation from overproduction and cheap commodities. ------------- >> Economists will squabble for decades over whether the large reduction in America�fs natural rate of unemployment in the 1990s was the result of the end of inflationary psychology, the coming of age of the information technology sector, the growing experience of the labour force, or all three.<< ------------- Sorry, I blinked and missed that little bit of history. ------------- >> But it is clear that the pattern of inflationary response to even minor monetary easing that has been feared by central banks since the 1970s is greatly weakened, or gone altogether.<< ------------- I think the danger the masters of the economy are trying to avoid is not European style inflation but Japanese style deflation. I guess the US can still learn from the Japanese! Of course, maybe with the weak dollar you'll get stagflation lurching ever forward to meet the new economic dawn. >>Third, that in large part because of changing technology, there has been an important shift in the efficient location of new technological development. The extraordinary economic success of the venture-startup system of Silicon Valley is not just a side effect of a stock market bubble, but is the result of a technology-driven decline in the relative competence of very large firms at tasks of developing (but not marketing) new technologies and new products.<< ------------- Venture startup? What's that? ------------- >>Fourth, that it is possible to capture most of the benefits of large-scale integration and also most of the benefits of fierce economic competition if businesses are forced ? either by the market or by regulatory authorities ? to make their products conform to standards so that other firms�f products work with theirs. If there is a lesson from the success of America's telecommunications industries over the past generation, it is that government regulation requiring firms to build products that other firms�f products could connect with was extraordinarily successful. << ------------- I like the way so many software developers were forced to develop software that would crash on every Windows OS computer I ever worked on. Also, the US spent something like a decade attacking European and Japanese standards setting as 'exclusionary'. Why? ------------- >>If there is a lesson from the success of America�fs personal computer industry, it is that the market�fs forcing nearly all hardware and software manufacturers to make their products first IBM and then Microsoft-compatible ? so that nearly any programme would run on nearly any microcomputer ?<< ------------- Make that 'nearly run' to disambiguate your prose. ------------- >> created extraordinary value. And if there is a lesson from the Internet boom, it is that the common http and html standard open-sourced by Tim Berners-Lee was overwhelmingly more powerful than the closed-source proprietary online system architectures of Compuserve, of Prodigy, of Minitel, or of the original AOL.<< ------------- Yeah, and e-mail more powerful? Why? Plain text. ------------- >>Will the rest of the world economy learn these four lessons before the pendulum swings away, and people cease for a time to look at the US for models to imitate? I hope so.<< ------------- I see now your piece was more about the US than Japan or US policy toward Japan. How disappointing. But couldn't you at least have said something about what having a currency that is forced to appreciate against the dollar 150% does to that currency's economy? CJ _________ Sorry, I've lost track of this so I'm giving it a new thread name. BDL: >>Then by the middle of 1995 the consensus suddenly shifted to a belief that Japan's economy was in real trouble, that a stagnant Japan was a very bad thing for the world (and for the U.S. too, in the long run), and that the U.S. needed to stop pressuring Japan on trade issues but instead to use whatever leverage it had to get Japan to take policy steps--cleaning up its banking system, boosting consumption--to get itself back to full employment. This point of view was strengthened by the Asia crisis, for it seemed that the lack of demand for products of other Asian countries by Japan was a big factor making the Asia crisis worse... << ------------------------ Whoa, a lot of presumptions here, aren't there? That the banking system needed cleaning up (in many ways, it was the most developed in the OECD). Get an economy going and you see how little debt is a problem. If the opposite is the case, and you see all sorts of 'bad' debt. More presumptions. That it was the US's place to pressure Japan in the first place. That the Japanese economy just simply needed a boost in consumption (how do you do that when you are in a long recession with massive restructuring etc.). But that's the first time I've ever heard about the full employment presumption. Everyone before was talking about making the Japanese workforce more 'flexible'. Alternative takes: The Clinton admin. backed off a cheap dollar/strong yen policy and this did indeed help reflate the Japanese economy (that is,a yen closer to PPP or a realistic level vs. the dollar did this). Then they reversed themselves again, mostly because US companies with production in China and SE Asia complained about having to compete with Japan again. Then all that debt in Asia became unpayable going from cheap dollars to dear, dear yen. Lights out all over Asia, 1997-8. BTW, the era of the strong yen has really put Japan through sea changes, even though most Americans have no idea of what those are. For a start, Japanese companies set up production in Asia, just like so many US companies. Japan now has a huge trade deficit with China. And China is well on its way of becoming the world's number industrial producer long before it becomes the top economy (that's still a long way off I'm afraid). I think, if Japanese exporters can compete at 115 yen to the dollar, they must be about 20% more efficient at what they do than anything in the US or Europe. Asia, it's hard to figure, because currencies are pegged to the dollar and totally out of whack. I realize labor in China is cheap, as is the currency, but I wonder how efficient most of it is, in any sense of the word I can think. Has anyone in the world of economics really figured out what happened to real consumption levels in Japan given the effects of deflation? Those Japanese who have money and steady employment seem to me to be buying more than they ever have, but for a lot less. Now not all of that is the effect of deflation on all the commodity inputs in the economy or the strong yen buying cheap imports direct. For example, retail has shifted entirely to national chains in shopping centers and malls, and there still hasn't been a complete shakeout and there is a lot of price competition to get retail share. CJ ------------ part one Doug Henwood Thank you for joining us, Gore Vidal. Right now we have a lot of liberals wagging their fingers telling us, "I told you so," about the George Bush regime, that people who said there was no difference between the two parties are now saying it's enormously big. How in the wake of the reaction to September eleventh do you read that kind of "no difference between the two" argument? Gore Vidal Well, Bush acted more quickly with repressive legislation to push us further along the road to a police state, which Clinton, two years after Oklahoma City, launched when he signed a special piece of legislation, the Anti-Terrorist Act, which removed a number of our freedoms as enumerated in the Bill of Rights. It was a bad bill. Then in the wake of 9-11, the Bush people, particularly Ashcroft, they were ready with, they had all sorts of terrifying totalitarian legislation ready, which was promptly passed. The USA PATRIOT act it was called, went through Congress without any debate, and many people said many congressmen never read it. Then when they began to look and

see what was in it, you know, the decapitation of the first-born, I believe, was in there, or something like it, it was filled with.... H The liberals would have waited for the second-born... V Well, they would wait till the last-born perhaps, thus doing away with contraception, which is causing their constituents such worry. Anyway, it was created, the bill, and now it's being corrected, I don't know what state it's in now and I don't think anybody does. But we are losing our liberties, and there is no doubt about it. And every day there are more and more examples, as Ashcroft gleefully says that he single-handedly suspended the confidentiality between lawyer and client, "if it's a terrorist situation." And now he's trying to lock up a woman who, a woman laywer who's worked for a terrorist, which it seems it has got the legal profession quite angry. The idea of a supine Congress, the best that corporate money can buy, is allowing this to go past them without any question, puts me in mind of my favorite Emperor - and I always talk about Emperors when I do Pacifica, at least on the West Coast - Tiberius, who was a very brilliant man, and a patriot in his way. When he became Emperor, the Senate passed a bill, assuring him that any legislation that he sent them would be automatically accepted, and become law. He sent back word and he said, "You're crazy. Suppose, suppose the Emperor is mad, suppose he's ill, suppose there's a palace coup and somebody else is sending things in his name? How can you be so certain that what you're passing is really his, or should be passed?" They sent it back: "Anything your Imperial Majesty sends us is law for us." And Tiberius said, "How eager they are to be slaves." And this is more and more my view of the American people in general. They've allowed an election to be stolen in November 2000. They made no fuss. We have perpetual war for perpetual peace. We have the Enemy-of-the-Month Club: one month it's Noriega, one month it's Saddam Hussein, one month it's Khadafy, currently it's Osama bin Laden, we are... "It's going to be a loooooong war!" said George W. Bush, with such glee, 'cause it means he has Imperial powers. And it also means that we are not going to get the Constitution back. Once civil rights are gone, they are gone. People get out of the habit of them. There is no peace party in the United States, a party that might say stop spending all this money on pointless wars, particularly in the Middle East and with the Moslem world - there are one billion Moslems and only a quarter billion Americans, and they seem to be extremely angry at us for a number of reasons. Since I am in the "why" business, I give in "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace," I go through many of the things that we have done to other countries that make them angry at us. And that's why the subtitle is, "How We Came to be so Hated." Americans say, "What? How could we be hated? We're the good guys. Everybody else, they're evil-doers." And when I heard the baby-talk coming out of George W. Bush's mouth in front of Congress, there's this Axis of Evil, Iran, Iraq and ... North Korea? I mean, he doesn't know where these places are, much less what evil is, and he doesn't even know... H Two of them hate each other and the third has nothing to do with them... V Exactly, and he doesn't know what an axis is, also. So... H Somebody else wrote the words for him. V Somebody else wrote them, would God made somebody else say them, but... I've never seen Americans so supine. I'm one of the few people around who remembers Pearl Harbor. I was fifteen years old. And that was the worst thing that had happened to us until 9-11. I also remember that two years after Pearl Harbor I enlisted in the Army. People like me did in those days. Unlike George W. Bush and Vice-President Cheney who both fled from the Vietnam War. Bush ends up in the Texas Air Force and Cheney was hidden away in some invulnerable place... H Setting a precedent for... V Setting a precedent for a Vice-President. And here these total non-patriots, they're what we used to call "draft-dodgers," are now leading the United States into war, war, war, next is Iraq, next will be Iran. They've listed about twelve possibilities for us to attack. Nobody quite knows why, except they might turn terrorist. Well, I can assure you one thing, if we attack them, they'll hit back, and we will have created terrorists, so we can have more war. H I want to get back to a point you made a while ago. Do you think the American public is ignorant, or kept deliberately so, of the real behavior of our government abroad, or do you think they're complicit even if only tacitly, as they sort of know what's going on but don't really want to hear the details. They might on some level realize it takes some ugly force to keep us a hundred times richer than the world's poorest people? How much complicity is there? V Very little. Eighty percent of Americans are doing badly, and they range from poverty to middle-class people who've lost their jobs at Enron due to the crookedness of the management, newly-unemployed formerly rather well-off people. That's eighty percent. Twenty percent are doing very well, working for the one percent that owns the country. The twenty percent, they go to Congress, they sit on the courts, and they run the corporations. So if you're talking about the eighty percent, you're talking about people who've never been educated. They stopped teaching geography about the time I left school. They don't teach it any more. Here, now we've got a world empire, nobody knows where anything is. They showed a bunch of students a map of the globe, all the continents and the oceans and so on, but with no labels, and they asked them to identify the United States. Well, eighty percent couldn't. Didn't know where it was. A number had a real sense of humor and they picked Panama, 'cause it looked kind of cute, you know, with two big blobs, one above it, one below it. So if they don't know where we are, I don't think they're ever going to know why we are. The media is so poisonous, and so brilliant at demonizing the Enemy-of-the-Month Club as I call it, you go from Khadafy one month, Hussein, Saddam Hussein another month, it never lets up, we've always got a new enemy. Because they're evil-doers; they have no motive for being evil, except they like being evil. That is the George W. Bush mantra. Well, we have made everyone in the world hate us. The contempt that Europeans have for Americas now, even in Italy where I live part of the year, and Italians have always been the most tolerant of us, even they are turning. I'm getting very nervous. I mean, their oil all comes from the Middle East, If we screw up again with Iraq - and I'll make you a bet that we are at war in Iraq in October, and Bush will be conducting that war in order to get more Republicans elected in a wartime atmosphere, so he can remove more of our liberties. And also get a crack at Caspian oil and natural gas. The last great reserves are in those five republics that used to be part of the Soviet Union and are now independent states with names like Kazakhistan. Well, we're after the oil in the five Istans. We went into Afghanistan not to get Osama bin Laden, that would have been nice if we did. We went in for a very good reason. The Taliban had been invented by us, to fight the Russians when they were occupying Afghanistan. The Taliban turned out to be flaky beyond belief and we couldn't do anything with them. Unocal, which is an oil company in California, had made a deal with the Tailban, to put a pipeline from, that would take, siphon off Caspian oil, pipe it through Afghanistan and down through Pakistan, to Karachi, to the Indian Ocean, and ship it off to China and make a fortune. It's the last great oil reserves in the world. That's what we were doing in Afghanistan, and that why we'll be hitting at Iraq. We are entering to steal. Now between stealing things that might benefit us, as you suggest, and going to war out of vanity, which was Vietnam. There was nothing there we wanted. But we went there because they dared defy us. And the domino theory, and every country would go Communist... I mean, the American people have been so pumped up with laughing gas that it's a wonder that they're sane enough to go about their business, which should be business and not war. So there we are, embarked upon a great adventure, with one billion Moslems hating us, and the contempt of all of Europe, the hatred of most of Latin America - for very good reason, we can't blame that on George W. Bush, we've had two hundred years to make them hate us down there. And we're making trouble in China, we're looking forward to a war in China. If I could find a way to get to the American people and say, "This junta that is governing us, this Enron/Pentagon junta, dedicated only to enrichment through the oil business, as all the Bushes and Cheneys and so on are oil people, they are going to destroy, for personal profit, the United States. We are going to be destroyed by the hatred of the rest fof the world." Suicide bombers. We always thought, well, we're pretty safe, we've got more bombers and more missiles and so on, when you're up against that, they could take out every city if we make enough of them angry. Every move that these fools in Washington make antagonizes more people. The first law of physics is there's no action without reaction. This has never been learned by an American government. We can swagger around, kill all the Indians, enslave these people, steal money - anything we want. And they're not supposed to get irritable. They do. H George Bush, a blue-blood exposed to the most expensive education money can buy, seems like one of the dimmest men ever to occupy the White House, and there's a lot of competition for that title. He almost makes Reagan look like an intellectual. What if anything does this say about the state of American society, or does the individual not matter that much? V Doesn't matter. We're run by corporate America, they have their interests. I've just explained why we're in Afghanistan, and back of that, if you want to go into the real "why," in this little book of mine that I've just done, I explain really why the Moslem world was sufficiently angry at what we had been doing to strike us at 9-11. We had built up a lot of hatred there and they took it out on us. I don't think it's Osama, I think he's part of it in some way, but... The best, the only news you really get, unless you know people who are actually involved, is from the European press, they do follow this, and they are not as strictly censored as the American press, where we don't get any facts of any kind. But the former foreign minister Mohammed Hakum, I used to know, of Egypt, he said, look, we've been tracking Osama for years. We know all about him, talking about the Egyptian Secret Service, as also Mossad had, the CIA has, we know everything about him. He's no more capable of pulling off as intricate a stunt as 9-11, organizing it, putting it in place, he said, that's a major country's has done that, with a secret service and modern forces. It isn't coming from a bunch of religious fanatics no matter how dedicated. They can't do it, any more than Timothy McVeigh all alone could have made that bomb and detonated it without blowing himself up. There was a larger group involved. And the FBI had a pretty good idea who they are. part two V Who governs? Obviously the oil companies are involved in our Middle-Eastern capers. And for those reasons we have motive, and we've provoked a response from Moslems. What Mohammed Hakul is suggesting, was that a country was involved, and he didn't say which one, but he was sort of pointing his finger at Pakistan. They had the secret service, they had the intelligence. And we do know that the head of their secret service, which is called ISI, a man called Mahmoud Ahmed, happened to be in Washington by the way at the time of 9-11, he had sent about two weeks before 9-11, a hundred thousand dollars to Mohammed Atta, the first suicide bomber who was in the United States. This was embarrassing when it came out, and he took early resignation, early retirement. So it probably comes from something like that. But our country is so put together and the media is so poisonous and collusive with government, none of this gets out to the people. They're never told any of this. They're told that there are evil-doers, and good people, that's us. And evil-doers do evil because that's their nature. And we're supposed to be satisfied with that. Maybe they think that all this sick religiosity we're suffering, particularly in the Protestant movement, and I am a Protestant, Southern department, that that may have made everybody sort of Fundamentalists and slightly simple-minded. But Americans are not simple-minded, and they're very quick when their interests are at stake, to figure out what's wrong. So I think that anyone who could find a way to break through - because you have to break through the media, the media is controlled by the bad guys - to break through, and start to tell them about things, why such-and-such has happened, why it is we always have two candidates, one Republican, one Democrat, that nobody wants to see President. This has been going on every election since Franklin Roosevelt, nobody has wanted any of them, and people used to ask, they don't ask any more, they just take it for granted, it's going to be somebody we don't care about. How does he get the job? So to get back to your obsession with George W. Bush, yes, he is very dumb, but his father's dumber. Poppy. When I was at Exeter, Poppy was at Andover, and Poppy's son George W. also went to Andover, where he was a cheerleader. A very distinguished cheerleader. Then he muddied around with a lot of Osama bin Laden's people, who have interests in Texas, and helped him with a little oil company, so they're all helped out by Saudi Arabians, people, future terrorists, of course they couldn't have known that. But they were chosen because they're malleable, they'll do whatever Enron, Andersen, you name the great financial entity wants them to do, they'll do it. H I'm speaking with Gore Vidal, author of many books but most recently Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace. American lefties are used to looking to Europe as a somewhat more civilized, humane environment; we're also looking at the rise of a very, of people painted as a kind of neo-fascist right in Europe. They've got Heider, Berlusconi, we're recording this just after Le Pen lost the runoff election. But what are your thoughts on this rise of the European right? V I think a lot of it is the American influence. I think they're so appalled by... They're calling the U.S. "the new Rome." And "the new Rome" doesn't, at least the lefties you advert to don't like it, and there's a great anti-American feeling, and they know that we tend to be always on the side of totalitarian politicians. We've never been on a liberal's side unless by accident. So they think of us as a pretty bad influence and there we are with NATO, which controls them militarily, and the CIA, controls a lot of their politics, their newspapers and how they view the world. I think also there's a sense of anomie going on in Italy and in France, that they've lost the old nation-state - at least that's the latest received opinion - and people are becoming nationalistic, 'cause now that's all one common currency and one common market. They have no sense of identity any more, other than a dislike of immigrants, foreigners, much like the United States. There are many jobs that Americans who are doing well in the twenty-first century were doing well that they don't want to do, they don't want to collect the garbage. So we go down, smash up a country like Colombia or Guatemala, and we get a lot of immigrants from those countries, and they do the work for less than the usual wage. That's how we keep our empire going, they depend on Moslems, they depend on Bengalis, people from that part of the world, and they're having trouble assimilating them, and they really don't know what going to happen to their culture. I think that's what they're going through now. I see no signs of fascism, certainly not in Italy. The French have always been bad-tempered, and they always come up with somebody really bad-tempered, who represents, you know, the national hangover, which is endemic due to that red wine they drink. H Tell us how you got to be friendly with Tim McVeigh, and ended up as a witness to his execution. V Well, I didn't go to the execution. I was invited by him. Very delicate, you know, when somebody asks, "Will you come to my execution?" If you say "no" you sound, you know, cold-hearted, as though you were rejecting him. If you say "yes" sounds as if you were delighted that he's being executed, I mean it's a very delicate thing. I did a piece on our loss of Bill of Rights in Vanity Fair, which piece is included in "Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace." This was about, this was after he'd been condemned to death about five, six years ago. And he read it when he was on death row in Colorado, and he wrote me a letter about the piece. I'd also mentioned his trial, and how part of the loss of our civil liberties was also the loss of our control over the Government, that suddenly the FBI declares war on a religious order in Waco, Texas, the Branch Davidians, and calls the Army in, and uses Army weaponry, poison gas and so on, against the Posse Comitatus Act of 1875, I think it was, and I then tied that in with what McVeigh had done, which was take revenge on the Federal Government. What they had done, Janet Reno presided, she's the head of the FBI or was at that time as Attorney General, it was the greatest massacre of Americans by Americans at Waco since Wounded Knee. Timothy McVeigh then, if he did it, went her one better and he killed more people at Oklahoma City. Do I have proof of that? No, I don't. But we started a correspondence, and he was very intelligent and very bright. He knew exactly what he felt about what had happened because he'd been a highly decorated soldier in the Gulf War. Got the Bronze Star, and he was a born sort of Eagle Scout type. An Eagle Scouter, he couldn't be responsible for many evils like killing innocent people in Oklahoma City. It would have been much better if he'd blown up an empty buiding. But he was serious about our liberties and about the country. He was also part of a much larger plot. I've gone into a lot of FBI reports in my book, indicating that there were so many leads that they did not follow up on. Why didn't they? They wanted one lone, crazed killer, and that was it. So I slightly undid them when I wrote about McVeigh, in a separate piece after his execution, suggesting what the defense had made a great case for, that it was a much larger plot. Now, the word "conspiracy" has been so demonized in America. America is the home of conspiracy. There has never been a conspiracy as large as Enron. It's the largest financial conspiracy on Earth. And what is a political party but a conspiracy to take power? We are the home of conspiracies, and fixing prices, and getting our money away from us for wars. And giving us nothing back. We're the only first-world country that does not have national health, does not have decent education for the general public. Every other country insists on that. That's why when you adverted to those American lefties who seem to think Europe is ahead, well, it is ahead, in the amenities of life, and in civilization. And we're way behind. And we're just pleased to have somebody as inferior as George W. Bush doing a war dance in front of Congress about axis-of-evils and how many enemies we've got, we're going to go after terrorism wherever it is on Earth! 'Cause we're good! H Everyone else envies the American way of life, right? V Not in my opinion. part three H Several times you suggested that American democracy's been hijacked or circumscribed over the years, but when was there a time when it was really more robust than now? Hasn't it always been an oligarchy, or has it gotten worse in that regard? V Well, it's much worse, because there are fewer safeguards for the average citizen. We always had the Bill of Rights, and if you could afford a lawyer, right there that puts you in a small category, you could fight the Government, you could maintain a certain amount of freedom. That's the thing that has been visibly most lost in the last few years. A perfect state we never achieved, because after all, we were founded with, slavery is in the Constitution, it was part of, it's a national institution, and though some of the Founders disliked slavery, there it is. It took a great civil war to get rid of it and the Civil War wasn't even about slavery, it was about preserving the Union. I would say that the years that produced the Depression, up to then I think we had a pretty good country. Certainly had a good public educational system - geography was my favorite, was a great school subject. And we had a good educational system, and those of us who went into the Army in the Second World War were far better educated at seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, than our equivalents today. H You ran for Congress many decades ago. Would you recommend that strategy to anyone else? V No, not today. You have to be a born mendicant, that is, beggar, to go in for Federal office. It costs too much. I went in to a Democratic primary for Senate in California about fifteen years ago, just to see what was going on. And a rather nice guy, senator from California, said to me, "You know, what do you want to do this for?" He was one of the good guys. And I said, well, I want to see what's going on, and by entering the race I can at least change the dialogue. I can bring up issues, and the papers have to cover you, that other people won't talk about, and so from that point of view I'd enjoy that. But get this: he said to me, "You realize," he said, this is his own experience, and he was not a rich man, nor was he owned by rich men, he said, "When I was elected, to a six year term, if you want to be re-elected six years later, you must raise ten thousand dollars a week for all six years of your first term." Well, how do you do that without selling your ass? So, I don't advise it for anybody unless you are in the prostitute business, or unless you like begging, there are some people who really like going around asking for money. Not I. H That's a strange fetish, I think. V Yes. H You were born to the elite and raised accordingly. How did you end up as a critic of oligarchy and empire? You could have written novels and not gotten into as much trouble as you have for taking political stands. How'd you end up this way? V Well, I think I have an overdeveloped sense of justice, probably, something that is largely lacking in our fellow citizens, who are brought up with this totally different ethos from many of us in my generation. It's just, you know, how do you get ahead, that's what most people think about. They think about themselves, their careers, and why not? At the same time, there should be issues that affect everybody. You see, I have a sense of country, and I have a great affection for the country, and particularly the country as devised by the Founders, and modified, sometimes in a good way and sometimes not, by their successors. I take it personally. It's a family affair. My family was in on the founding of the United States. So I take it personally. And I know quite a few people of my generation who did take it personally. I don't meet anybody now... can you imagine Bush Jr., staying out, obviously he was thinking about a political career, 'cause his father was doing well in one, but he felt safe staying out of a national war? Or Cheney, who became a congressman before he rose to invisibility, staying out? Even Clinton, whom I kind of liked... The only noble deed that Clinton ever did was the famous letter to the draft board saying why you... H Mixed bag, he was also worried about his political career... V Yeah, he was worried about that, but it was a Hell of a good letter, and very noble. H How does he get excoriated for that, then Bush and Cheney get a free pass? V Well, because everybody knows they've been bought. Everybody knows they're hired. And, you see, no one takes them seriously. Clinton, people took seriously, because he was a wonderful speaker, he was a great explainer, he understood the economy, everybody knew that. The other presidents just went blank on the subject of economics. Clinton could lecture your ear off. So if you don't respect the man who's president, you don't expect much from him. H Years ago I heard that White Supremacist Tom Metzger, on his Aryan Uptake phone hot-line offering a video of one of your lectures for sale, and the sympathetic things that you said about Tim McVeigh also have given people pause. Now there's a long-standing... V I want to know more about Tom Metzger. H He just offered this video on his hotline for sale of one of your lectures. V. Is he alive? H Yeah, he is. He runs White Aryan Resistance, in Southern California. V Oh, that Metzger. H Yeah. V He was around twenty years ago. H There is this long-standing, kind of right-leaning nativist critique of Empire and centralizing power. What affinities or lack of affinities do you feel in that? V Well, look at Pat Buchanan, who borrowed a great deal from me, for "A Republic, Not an Empire." That is what I've been saying for half a century, that we're not in the Empire business, or we should not be in the Empire business, because we're not very good at it, and we have so much wrong in our own country. So there is a moment, I would suspect, that the far-right has to have something positive to talk about, instead of worrying about getting rid of the inferior breeds, or what they think of as the inferior breeds. So, the anti-imperial is an interesting thing for them to take up, 'cause I'd think they'd be on the other side. But as many people want to join that, why not? H How do we extricate ourselves from this drive toward a repressive imperial state? Is there any way the American population can rise and throw off the chains, or are you kind of pessimistic that it's going to be irresistible? V Well, we have very little, since we don't have representative government I don't see how we could do it. I see it ending, and I see it ending fairly soon. You're an economist of sorts, I gather? We're going to go broke. This deficit spending that we're doing now, in just the last few days, it's horrendous. We're in the, they've already spent Social Security, as if it had ever been saved, 'cause they used to replace the real money that we sent in, in the form of taxes, they replaced them with IOUs called Treasury Bonds. I owe you some money, and one day I'll pay it back. As if we'll ever get that back. Now they're going to use it all up, that famous surplus that Clinton went on about, was the Social Security surplus. They were counting that as Federal revenue. Well, it wasn't Federal revenue, it's a separate trust fund, not to be touched. I think all the money in it is gone, or has been, you know, put off to one side as collateral, to pay for perpetual war. H Well, there's a lot of room in the country, as Adam Smith said. You once anointed Christopher Hitchens as your successor. Has his support of the war, and even the kind things he's had to say about George W. Bush, made you think about rewriting your intellectual will? V Well... growing pains. This will pass. It's like acne. H OK, I think that will bring it to a close. Thanks for joining us, Gore Vidal. V Thank you. ----- this was leftbusinessobserver.com/VidalTranscript.html ------------------------------------  JHR Home Page Vol. (Year): No.: Karl Marx: Anti-Semite JAMES B. WHISKER Karl Marx was not only Jewish, he was descended from an established rabbinical family. His father had abandoned the practice of Judaism in order to function more freely in and with the newly established Prussian state, and in order to attract more clients to his law practice. Biographers do agree that age-old Jewish traditions continued to run deep in Herschel Marx's family long after he had ceased attending the synagogue. Karl Marx probably had no formal ties with Judaism, but he was acutely aware of its theology and its traditions. Lack of formal practice cannot here be equated with ignorance. Indeed, Karl Marx apparently had studied the bases of all Western religions throughout his life. As a "Young Hegelian," commonly known as the Hegelians of the Left, Marx had been exposed to the often bizarre interpretations of organized religion. Among the earliest of his publications was The Holy Family, little more than a plagiarism of the leftist Hegelian leader Ludwig Feuerbach's Essence of Christianity. It was in the juvenile Holy Family that Marx coined the oft-quoted phrase "Religion is the opiate of the people." The idea was hardly original with him. It was a reasonably cogent summation of one of the principal of Feuerbach's ideas, which was that man is alienated from himself by virtue of his dependence on God. By concentrating on God and by assuring himself that God will right all wrongs and reward all sufferings in the next world, man is said to fail to realize that he can correct injustice and prevent the evils of the world in this world by and through his own efforts. Religion has a narcotic effect by soothing us so that we do not mind that we are miserable. All our sufferings, trials and tribulations, sorrows and despair are part of a divine plan wherewith we work out our salvation; thus they are to be accepted and cherished, not defeated or circumvented or prevented. The Holy Family was an attack on all religion, without prejudice against any one specific variety. There was no real attempt in it to separate Christianity from Judaism. Inasmuch as many of the Young Hegelians were apostate Jews, some had shown especial concern for the status of Judaism, but not prejudice against Jews for religious reasons. Hence, in a sense, freedom from religion was really a form of release for Jews. These leftist followers of George William Frederick Hegel assumed that without any religion in the new state there would be no point of separation between Jews and Gentiles, ex-Christians and ex-Jews. The onus of "Christ killer" would no longer be meaningful, any more than accusations leveled against any other group for killing any other individual or group of individuals. Indeed, Christ as a rejected symbol of false hope would be killed for a second time, and at least this second death would be the cause of liberation, rejoicing and new hope for the suffering masses. With most of this Marx could wholeheartedly agree. Christ had to die a second time, and this time there would be no resurrection. Marx agreed that without religion there could and would be no religious persecutions and prejudices. This was a sound example of an analytic logic in which he had great faith. But there were parts of the argument put by the Young Hegelians with which Marx totally disagreed. And this disagreement marks the first clear-cut application of Marx's anti-Semitism. The Jew would and could not change his character and habits any more than a tiger could shed its stripes. Marx concluded that Judaism was more than possible even without God, the Ten Commandments, the Ark of the Covenant, or the Bible. Judaism had nothing, or at least very little, to actually do with God or religion. It was essentially a cultural phenomenon, based on the acquisition of material wealth. It was a system of cultural and religious deception whose real concern was capital, bullion, currency - in short, whatever the coin of the realm or the currency of the era presented or valued. With this, Marx has a somewhat original idea to present to his fellow Hegelians of the Left. He had not merely copied this insight from Moses Hess, Bruno Bauer, Lorenz von Stein, or Feuerbach. He had added the popular perception of the times and, as an intellectual and a cultural and ethnic, if not religious, Jew, he presented the argument in a form somewhat more articulate than that of the streetcorner pamphleteer. The apostate Jew and direct descendant of a long line of rabbis, Karl Marx, had provided powerful ammunition for the Jew-baiter and the anti-Semite among the apostate Jewish community of intellectuals at the German universities. He had spoken the unspeakable and had challenged the fundamentals of religion. He had in fact created a racist theory second to none among the intellectuals of the nineteenth century on the European continent. There is nothing in Arthur de Gobineau or in Houston Stewart Chamberlain that is more powerful or damning in its content with reference to Jews than Marx's On The Jewish Question (1843), also known as A World Without Jews. This odd little book on the "Jewish Question" was written in response to Dr. Bruno Bauer's The Jewish Question (1843), also known as The Capacity of Today's Jews and Christians to Become Free. Marx's booklet has had a curious publishing history. The first unexpurgated English translation did not appear until made available through the clearly anti-Zionist Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow about 1955. Then the Philosophical Library published an English edition (1959) with a curious and apologetic introduction by the press's editor, Dagobert Runes. German and other editions are scarce, save for those distributed by the communist state press. More intriguing than the scarce-availability of the book is the fact that most scholars have either seemed acutely unaware of its existence, or have simply chosen to ignore it. Certainly, the booklet does not fit in well with the secular humanistic and liberationist theological picture of Karl Marx as the great humanitarian and liberator of the oppressed. Truly, the work presents an obstacle. How can Marx be presented as the champion of all that is good and right in the world when he was in fact so unalterably opposed to Jews and Judaism? A passing remark here or there might be excused; a whole essay on - and of -nothing but anti-Semitism is an entirely different matter and a more complex question. The liberal-left is no more able to cope with A World Without Jews than is the communist world able to deal with Marx's bitter attacks on Russia, in his several essays denouncing Russian communist movements which have been collectively published as Marx Against Russia. Marx made specific charges against the Jews in his polemic. Jews worship Mammon, not God. Jews practice usury. Their true religion is predicated upon the acquisition of money through any and all means. The emancipation of all Europeans means the emancipation from Jewry: "emancipation from usury and money, that is, from practical, real Judaism, would constitute the emancipation of our time." Jews seek to control the world through the control of money: "What is the object of the Jew's worship in this world? Usury. What is his worldly god? Money. . . . What is the foundation of the Jew in this world? Practical necessity, private advantage. . . . The bill of exchange is the Jew's real God. His God is the illusory bill of exchange." Marx further alleges: "Money is the one zealous god of Israel, beside which no other god may stand. Money degrades all the gods of mankind and turns them into commodities. Money is the universal and self-constituted value set upon all things. It has therefore robbed the whole world, of both nature and man, of its original value. Money is the essence of man's life and work which have become alienated from him: this alien monster rules him and he worships it." It is from such statements as these, and from the basic tenets of A World Without Jews, that we discover some of the reasons for the mass appeal of National Socialism among the German working class to which Marxism-Leninism had once appealed. The fundamental and overriding racism of Marx himself helped to create an atmosphere in which Alfred Rosenberg's Zur Protokollen wisen Zionismus could be accepted. The anti-Semitism of the master communist planner and theorist - and Jew - Karl Marx, helped to create the preconditions for the later acceptance of Alfred Rosenberg's many conclusions about Jews in Der Mythus des 20. Jahrhunderts. There is no clear and direct charge in A World Without Jews of a universal Jewish conspiracy. Marx's work lacks the charge of clear-cut direction of and central control over the Jewish community contained in The Protocols of the Wise Men of Zion. But only that separates the two works. Both agree in the fundamentals of a Jewish mammonistic approach to the world and its inhabitants. Both agree that Judaism is nothing more - or less - than a form of money-grabbing and money-worshipping secularism. Judaism's culture, the two works agree, is a pseudo-culture that seeks only material gain for its adherents. Marx believed that man originally was good and that he naturally looked at all objects as an extension of his self. Objects were weighed according to the good that could accrue in the sense of self-fulfillment and in terms of providing a unified and integrated man, or, as Marx might prefer to put it, in terms of guaranteeing that man would not become alienated from himself. Alienation is the basis of man's illness, in the Marxist paradigm. The "Jewish mentality" that seeks only material gain from objects is necessarily productive of alienation. Man reduces objects to their monetary value. One does not keep that which has no value, unless he cannot sell it; one sells for money and for riches anything that he has, and disregards the cost in loss of self (self-alienation). Marx charged that even mother or wife is thereby reduced to a monetary transaction, thought of in terms of gains and losses. "Even the relations between the sexes, between man and woman, becomes an object of commerce. The woman is auctioned off." The world of aesthetics is reduced to a world of monetary gain. A painting is great because it can command a large price. An opera or other musical composition is judged according to its salability. Poetry and prose is to be valued for its market potential, not for its thoughts, expressions or beauty. Thus, a pornographic work may become greater than a true creation of inspired genius because its market potential is greater. Beyond market considerations, art has no value. Marx accuses the Jewish religion of having nothing but "contempt for. . . art, history and man." The Jew "cannot create a new world," be it an historical one or one of aesthetic escapism; he can merely calculate how the world might be turned into a profit. Other men create, while the Jew, Marx assures us, can only create the marketplace in which creative products are to be sold; he creates a scale of values by which to measure in terms of money the worth of a creation. The rampant materialism which Marx abhorred - despite his own materialism and economic determinism - was the work of the earth-centered Jew. Marx concluded that the Gentile had created capitalism, but the Jew had perfected its marketing potentials. In short: without the Jew, capitalism would have been an entirely different phenomenon. The Gentile had to create it because the Jew could not conceive any new worlds on his own, but the Jew could turn capitalism into a wholly materialistic and money-oriented system based on gain at any cost. An obscure essay by Alfred Rosenberg, The Earth-Centered Jew Lacks a Soul, has much the same theme: The Jew made capitalism into an earth-centered system that is thoroughly dehumanizing. He had created an atmosphere in which he and many Gentiles operated. Competition forced the non-Jew to perform his business functions like the Jew -or fail. If the modern capitalist state would continue even without Jews, Rosenberg concluded, it would he as it is now because the Jew had removed the soul from the system. Economics was no longer moral; it was a system with no soul. It had been successfully divorced from moral philosophy. One knew Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations, but not his The Theory of Moral Sentiments. If the capitalist system was to survive intact, in the form with which men were familiar, the Jew would survive as the archetype of the capitalist man. Neither Rosenberg nor Marx attempted an apology for the status of the "earth-centered Jew." There was no historical tracing of the why of it all: of the prejudices and restrictions that may have forced the Jew into money lending or commerce. The Jew was not as he was depicted by these critics because of conditions that were dehumanizing and beyond his control. The Jew was as he was, they agreed, because that is the way of all Jews: it is a racial-cultural characteristic that cannot in any way be altered or ameliorated. A World Without Jews was not an isolated work in the sense that it alone contained Marx's anti-Jewish thoughts and positions. Other essays such as The Class Struggle in France and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon contained strong statements indicting the Jews for various crimes against humanity. Even in The German Ideology one finds occasional statements like "It is the circumvention of the law that makes the religious Jew a religious Jew." His dislike for rival socialist leader Ferdinand Lassalle prompted Marx to refer to that writer as "Juden Itzig [Jew-Nigger]." What emerged from Marx was a clear condemnation of both Jews and Judaism. They had been wholly identified with all the worst elements of capitalism, most notably exploitation of the workers and the manipulation of money in the practice of usury. Marx did not state precisely whether he would have preferred a refabrication of society - without the Jews or whether it would have been sufficient to merely remove the "Jewish mentality." The portion of the communist program relating to the confiscation of alien property, as given in Marx and Engels' Communist Manifesto, has been thought by some to relate to the expropriation of Jewish property. This is debatable, but it is a curious addition to that document, whatever the rationale for its inclusion. The overall weight of evidence suggests that the "liberation from Judaism" of which Marx wrote so often is the liberation of society generally from Jews, rather than the liberation of Jews from an earth-centered climate of opinion. "The emancipation of our time," Marx wrote, "means the emancipation from practical Jewry." We must not think of Marx's racism as confined merely to his baiting of Jews. Marx was a true European of his time, and for him no race save the Caucasian had established itself, committed deeds that might be recorded in history. The yellow and black races were definitely excluded from history, having had no role in the development of the world or of the idea of history. Marx never, however, wrote anything attacking other races or peoples comparable to his attacks on the Jews. There exists bits and pieces of racist rhetoric, such as his use of the term Itzig, which can be translated best as "nigger." Even had Marx been a more productive and wide-ranging writer, and his attention been drawn more to other nations and other peoples, there seems little doubt that he would indeed have shrunk away from writing something such as Carlyle's Disquisition on the Nigger Question. A careful reading of Marxism does reveal what, though not explicitly stated, Marx's "line" was on these matters. The Proletarian Revolution will not occur in nations of the undeveloped, non-Caucasian (as we call it now, Third) world. Marx often named the nations in which his thought and prognosis were applicable: Germany, France, Great Britain, the United States, Belgium, the Netherlands, Holland, and other European or Caucasian nations. Marx never included in his grand schematic the nations of the Far East, Latin America or sub-Saharan Africa. The exclusion of Russia from his system provides a good insight into his thinking. If Russia was to be considered a European nation then it might, at least one day in the future, be subject to the dialectical and historical stages of progress and development through which the remainder of the European nations had passed or were passing. If Russia were, however, Asiatic, at least in the main, it would not pass through the stages and progressions of other nations built and inhabited by Caucasians. The man who invented the Dialectic, G.W.F. Hegel, had made no provision for applying the dialectical operations of his Weltgeist (World-Spirit) to nations other than those traditionally grouped as "Western Civilization." Marx did not choose to alter this in his own construction. If the Dialectic does not operate in a nation, that nation is quintessentially outside history. Events still occur and time passes, but nothing of true historical meaning or value can pass. It remained for other Marxist-socialist theorists to excise or cover-up the racist remarks in the writings of Karl Marx, and to establish a worldwide appeal for Marxism. Friedrich Engels was able to establish something of a historic and revolutionary role for Third World nations, and Lenin included them in his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. The German socialist Eduard Bernstein removed anti-Semitic remarks from Marx's Letters to Engels. It remains that A World Without Jews is unknown to all but a handful in the West. Racist remarks in other of Marx's works have been excised by sympathetic editors or passed over apologetically with the flip explanation that Marx was doing nothing more than reflecting the prejudices of his time and place. But Soviet communism has in fact returned to its anti-Semitic roots. Theoretically the Soviet communist state allows the practice of Judaism, while opposing political Zionism. And it is most interesting that the distinction made in Soviet Russia and in other communist satellite nations between the "Sabbath Jew" and the "Zionist Jew" is remarkably similar to the distinction made in National Socialist Germany between the practicing Jew and the earth-centered, irreligious Jew. Bibliographical Note The primary source for the racist theories of Karl Marx is his A World Without Jews (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959), which was edited end translated by Dagobert D. Runes. Since Runes made reference to the official Soviet edition of the same work we may safely assume that this undated edition published by the Foreign Languages Publishing House in Moscow was done before 1959. Of the other works in which Marx made passing references to Jews, editions abound. These works include: The German Ideology, The Class Struggle in France, Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, and Letters to Engels. Many of the letters were published in L. Feuer (ed.), Marx and Engels: Writings on Politics and Philosophy (Anchor Books). The Foreign Languages Publishing House editions of Marx's many works tend to be accurate and inexpensive. One of the first discussions in English of Marx's anti-Semitism was Zygmund Dobbs, "Karl Marx: Father of Modern Anti-Semitism," Plain Talk (September 1949). The fundamental secondary source for Marx's racism and anti-Semitism is Nathaniel Weyl, Karl Marx: Racist (New Rochelle, N.Y.: Arlington House, 1979). On the parallels to Alfred Rosenberg in National Socialist Germany, consult Rosenberg's The Myth of the Twentieth Century (Torrance Calif.: Noontide Press, 1982). Rosenberg's essay "The Earth-Centered Jew Lacks a Soul" is found in George Masse, Nazi Culture (New York;Grosset & Dunlap, 1966) and in J.B. Whisker (ed., trans.), National Socialist Ideology: Concepts and Ideas (Greensboro, North Carolina; W.U.N. Press, 1979). Source: Reprinted from The Journal of Historical Review, vol. 5, no. 1, p. 69-76. Published with permission of and courtesy to the Institute for Historical Review (IHR). Domestic subscriptions $40 per year; foreign subscriptions $50 per year. For the current IHR catalog, with a complete listing of books and audio and video tapes, send one dollar to: Institute For Historical Review Post Office Box 2739 Newport Beach, California 92659 email: ihr@ihr.org Back to Table of Contents JHR vol. 5 Did you find a mistake on our Web Site? Please don't hesitate to tell us: error@vho.org Back to Top Menu