A Democratic Multitude
Dan Clore
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
In These Times
November 22, 2002
A Democratic Multitude
By David Graeber
Any way you measure it, November’s European Social Forum was
a spectacular success. After the nightmare of the G-8
meetings in Genoa a year and a half before, the prospect of
any large-scale convergence of globalization activists in
Italy was a matter of widespread trepidation. Almost as soon
as organizers named Florence as the location, Prime Minister
Silvio Berlusconi announced that "police intelligence" had
discovered that activists were planning to wreak widespread
destruction in the ancient city. The announcement was backed
up by an endless campaign of scaremongering on Italian TV
and in print media, much of which is owned by Berlusconi.
The organizers--who had selected Florence partly because its
citizens had just elected a radical mayor--demanded an
audience with government ministers, where they presented a
simple proposal: We are not intending violence or
destruction, they said, but we are also determined to hold
the forum in Florence, with permission or not. If police
tried to shut it down by force, some activists would
certainly defend themselves; it was really up to the
government whether they wanted there to be violence. So the
government gave in. For the moment.
One might say that the idea of a Social Forum is to create a
new conception of the public, not as voters or passive
spectators, but as the kind of public that might exist in a
truly free society. A "democratic multitude" is the
currently popular phrase in Italy (it originally goes back
to Spinoza). Instead of old-fashioned talk of "the masses,"
with its implications of faceless uniformity--a sea of gray
faces rallying behind some great leader or glued to some
giant screen--"the multitude" is inherently heterogeneous,
an endless colorful array self-organized groups converging
for some purposes and going their separate ways for others.
The Social Forum was a place for such a multitude to
converge: In this case, to imagine what Europe might look
like if the principles underlying these groups were
generalized. It would be, among other things, a Europe of
open borders, networks of cooperative enterprises connected
by complex systems of barter or social exchange, in which a
massive diminution of certain forms of ecologically
destructive consumerism would be compensated by guaranteed
incomes, drastically reduced hours of work and frenetically
intensified cultural production.
--------------
And the forum itself? Imagine if you will something halfway
between a carnival and the largest academic conference in
world history, with 60,000 delegates--but the average age
was in the mid-twenties, and at least half the delegates
sported dreadlocks, piercings or kaffiyehs. Ancient
arsenals--all part of the Renaissance fortress in which the
conference was held—were packed with audiences of up to
6,000, listening to discussions of the Argentine barter
economy, strategies for civil disobedience, or the relation
of sexuality and revolution. The whole event culminated on
November 9 with one of the largest peace marches Europe has
ever seen, an enormous festival of music and costumes that
even the police estimated at 500,000; organizers claimed
more than a million.
Without the support of the city government, Berlusconi and
his allies were unable to manufacture another Genoa, and all
the scare tactics came to nothing. There are dangers here,
however. The main Italian organizers of the event were
political parties like the Greens and Rifondazione
Comunista, along with the Disobédienti (formerly Ya Basta!),
which have been criticized for their reliance on top-down
organizational structures. They and reformist groups like
the French ATTAC dominated the speeches and seminars; the
anarchists and most other actual practitioners of
self-organization found themselves exiled to the margins
(the Italian Independent Media Center along with most
anarchists ended up operating out of a space called the Hub
half a mile away from the fortress).
Media campaigns endlessly represented them as the "violent
fringe," although these were almost the only groups in
attendance that rejected any idea of imposing their views by
force. But that propaganda made it much easier for some on
center stage--like Alex Callinicos of the British Socialist
Workers Party--to lecture the crowds about how foolish and
destructive it was to imagine there was ever something
fundamentally new about the current movement (some nonsense
about new organizational forms coming out of the Zapatistas,
or whatever), insisting instead that the core of the
movement has always been established labor unions and
political parties. Those who would like to reduce us to
faceless masses are never far away.
As if to highlight such dangers, almost as soon as the event
was over, the government struck back, hauling off some 20
activists in raids all over Italy, accusing them of
conspiring to disrupt the government during previous
protests in Naples and Genoa. Organizers of events like the
Social Forum must stand behind such people--and ultimately,
that means not only demanding their release, but letting
them into backrooms where agendas appear to be made or,
better, democratizing the process altogether. No movement
can survive if it allows itself to be cut off from the
sources of its own creativity.
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
All my fiction through 2001 and more. Intro by S.T. Joshi.
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
Lord We˙rdgliffe and Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
News for Anarchists & Activists:
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Said Smygo, the iconoclast of Zothique: "Bear a hammer with
thee always, and break down any terminus on which is
written: 'So far shalt thou pass, but no further go.'"
--Clark Ashton Smith
Oliver Kamm
>
> A Democratic Multitude
>
> By David Graeber
>
> Any way you measure it, November's European Social Forum was
> a spectacular success. After the nightmare of the G-8
> meetings in Genoa a year and a half before, the prospect of
> any large-scale convergence of globalization activists in
> Italy was a matter of widespread trepidation. Almost as soon
> as organizers named Florence as the location, Prime Minister
> Silvio Berlusconi announced that "police intelligence" had
> discovered that activists were planning to wreak widespread
> destruction in the ancient city. The announcement was backed
> up by an endless campaign of scaremongering on Italian TV
> and in print media, much of which is owned by Berlusconi.
>
> The organizers--who had selected Florence partly because its
> citizens had just elected a radical mayor--demanded an
> audience with government ministers, where they presented a
> simple proposal:
[snip]
Note that these groupuscules demanded an audience with government
ministers having been elected by no one and being accountable to no
one. They are, in short, much less representative than the government
leaders they riot against, and are not remotely accurately described
as 'a democratic multitude'.
G*rd*n
| > A Democratic Multitude
| >
| > Any way you measure it, November's European Social Forum was
| > a spectacular success. After the nightmare of the G-8
| > meetings in Genoa a year and a half before, the prospect of
| > any large-scale convergence of globalization activists in
| > Italy was a matter of widespread trepidation. Almost as soon
| > as organizers named Florence as the location, Prime Minister
| > Silvio Berlusconi announced that "police intelligence" had
| > discovered that activists were planning to wreak widespread
| > destruction in the ancient city. The announcement was backed
| > up by an endless campaign of scaremongering on Italian TV
| > and in print media, much of which is owned by Berlusconi.
| >
| > The organizers--who had selected Florence partly because its
| > citizens had just elected a radical mayor--demanded an
| > audience with government ministers, where they presented a
olive...@tiscali.co.uk (Oliver Kamm):
| Note that these groupuscules demanded an audience with government
| ministers having been elected by no one and being accountable to no
| one. They are, in short, much less representative than the government
| leaders they riot against, and are not remotely accurately described
| as 'a democratic multitude'.
According to the story, however, the groups were demanding
only ordinary rights of assembly and association, which had
been threatened by the said government ministers. Who they
were accountable to or represented was irrelevant.
It seems odd, though, that Berlusconi and company did not
simply provide as much violence as necessary through the
time-honored fashion of _agents_provocateurs_. It would be
interesting to know how they were warded off.
--
(<><>) /*/
}"{ G*rd*n }"{ g...@panix.com }"{
{ http://www.etaoin.com | latest new material 11/14/02 <-adv't
Guilherme C Roschke
> > citizens had just elected a radical mayor--demanded an
> > audience with government ministers, where they presented a
> > simple proposal:
>
> [snip]
>
> Note that these groupuscules demanded an audience with government
> ministers having been elected by no one and being accountable to no
> one. They are, in short, much less representative than the government
> leaders they riot against, and are not remotely accurately described
> as 'a democratic multitude'.
>
would have all been part of the system if they were donors.
-gr
Josh Dougherty
news:Pine.GSO.4.44.021124...@unagi.cis.upenn.edu...
Are you questioning the sanctity of one dollar = one vote democracy?!? How
elitist of you.
Josh
Giorgio Torrieri
> > Any way you measure it, November's European Social Forum was
> > a spectacular success. After the nightmare of the G-8
> > meetings in Genoa a year and a half before, the prospect of
> > any large-scale convergence of globalization activists in
> > Italy was a matter of widespread trepidation. Almost as soon
> > as organizers named Florence as the location, Prime Minister
> > Silvio Berlusconi announced that "police intelligence" had
> > discovered that activists were planning to wreak widespread
> > destruction in the ancient city. The announcement was backed
> > up by an endless campaign of scaremongering on Italian TV
> > and in print media, much of which is owned by Berlusconi.
> >
> > The organizers--who had selected Florence partly because its
> > citizens had just elected a radical mayor--demanded an
> > audience with government ministers, where they presented a
> > simple proposal:
> Note that these groupuscules demanded an audience with government
> ministers having been elected by no one and being accountable to no
> one. They are, in short, much less representative than the government
> leaders they riot against, and are not remotely accurately described
> as 'a democratic multitude'.
As an Italian citizen, I do not find a Governament headed by the guy who
owns 60% of the Italian Media, and which committed grevious human
rights abuses against protesters (Genoa, 2001) rapresentative at all.
People who get off their butts and put their their time and their
personal safety at risk for a better world are far more rapresentative.
Martin Luther King, the Freedom Riders and the Antiwar protesters
were a democratic multitude PRECISELY because they took to the street.
GT
M J Carley
>It seems odd, though, that Berlusconi and company did not simply
>provide as much violence as necessary through the time-honored
>fashion of _agents_provocateurs_. It would be interesting to know
>how they were warded off.
The rumour in Florence was that the local police (employed by the
city) had said that they would be on the side of the ESFers if the
Carabinieri attacked.
Of course, the Economist claims it was because hundreds of outside
agitators were prevented from entering Italy in the first place.
--
`Al vero filosofo ogni terreno e' patria.'
BHaLC #6
No MS attachments: http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
Home page: http://staff.bath.ac.uk/ensmjc/
Oliver Kamm
"Giorgio Torrieri" <luno...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:9ce9c325.02112...@posting.google.com...
> olive...@tiscali.co.uk (Oliver Kamm) wrote in message
news:<40cd7d30.02112...@posting.google.com>...
>
> owns 60% of the Italian Media, and which committed grevious human
> rights abuses against protesters (Genoa, 2001) rapresentative at all.
Indeed, who on earth supports the man apart from, erm, the electorate?
>
> People who get off their butts and put their their time and their
> personal safety at risk for a better world are far more rapresentative.
>
> Martin Luther King, the Freedom Riders and the Antiwar protesters
> were a democratic multitude PRECISELY because they took to the street.
And Mussolini too, given that he got off his butt and marched on Rome?
Once again, we see the contempt for democracy and the inherent fascism of
the Chomsky cult.
M J Carley
>"Giorgio Torrieri" <luno...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
>news:9ce9c325.02112...@posting.google.com...
>> olive...@tiscali.co.uk (Oliver Kamm) wrote in message
>news:<40cd7d30.02112...@posting.google.com>...
>>
>> As an Italian citizen, I do not find a Governament headed by the guy who
>> owns 60% of the Italian Media, and which committed grevious human
>> rights abuses against protesters (Genoa, 2001) rapresentative at all.
>
>Indeed, who on earth supports the man apart from, erm, the electorate?
Well, no, actually.
Election result breakdown:
Camera dei Deputati
Casa delle liberta': 45.4% 282 seats
Ulivo: 43.7% 184 seats
Votes for parties not integrated in one of the alliances:
Democrazia Europea: 2.4%
Italia dei Valori: 3.9%
Partito Radicale: 2.2%
Rifondazione
Communista: 5.0%
http://www.iic-berlino.de/culturita/11.9.htm
(The total percentage comes to 102.6, which I can only attribute to
rounding error, probably in adding the contributions from the
different parties within the electoral alliances.)
Guilherme C Roschke
> > As an Italian citizen, I do not find a Governament headed by the guy who
> > owns 60% of the Italian Media, and which committed grevious human
> > rights abuses against protesters (Genoa, 2001) rapresentative at all.
>
> Indeed, who on earth supports the man apart from, erm, the electorate?
what was his vote in florence?
-gr
Giorgio Torrieri
> > As an Italian citizen, I do not find a Governament headed by the guy who
> > owns 60% of the Italian Media, and which committed grevious human
> > rights abuses against protesters (Genoa, 2001) rapresentative at all.
> Indeed, who on earth supports the man apart from, erm, the electorate?
With 60% of control of the Media, record abstentions, and persecution
of protesters, still don't find this very "rapresentative".
The governament in the '60s was "supported by the electorate".
MLK and the anti-war protesters still marched ("rioted") on 'em.
The fact that they were indeed democratic (dangerous PRECISELY because
they
were democratic) was confirmed by none other than Samuel Huntigton,
who
wrote, in 1975, that
" some of the problems of governance in the United States today stem
from an excess of
democracy... Needed, instead, is a greater degree of moderation of
democracy."
> > People who get off their butts and put their their time and their
> > personal safety at risk for a better world are far more rapresentative.
> >
> > Martin Luther King, the Freedom Riders and the Antiwar protesters
> > were a democratic multitude PRECISELY because they took to the street.
>
> And Mussolini too, given that he got off his butt and marched on Rome?
Sorry, wrong call.
Mussolini marched at the behest of power, his "getting off his butt"
was approved and supported by the king. The protesters ,including
the
million in Florence, marched to challenge power.
I guess the difference for you is insubstantial.
GT
Dan Clore
> David Graeber:
In case you don't know, G*rd*n, Oliver Kamm is one of the
trolls currently infesting alt.fan.noam-chomsky. It's no
surprise to discover that his vision of democracy begins and
ends at the ballot box, nor that he condemns the idea that
one might request assurances that one will not be attacked
for exercising the rights of free speech and assembly as an
affront to their "democratic" authority.
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
All my fiction through 2001 and more. Intro by S.T. Joshi.
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
Lord Weÿrdgliffe and Necronomicon Page:
G*rd*n
|>|> A Democratic Multitude
|>|>
|>|> Any way you measure it, November's European Social Forum was
|>|> a spectacular success. After the nightmare of the G-8
|>|> meetings in Genoa a year and a half before, the prospect of
|>|> any large-scale convergence of globalization activists in
|>|> Italy was a matter of widespread trepidation. Almost as soon
|>|> as organizers named Florence as the location, Prime Minister
|>|> Silvio Berlusconi announced that "police intelligence" had
|>|> discovered that activists were planning to wreak widespread
|>|> destruction in the ancient city. The announcement was backed
|>|> up by an endless campaign of scaremongering on Italian TV
|>|> and in print media, much of which is owned by Berlusconi.
|>|>
|>|> The organizers--who had selected Florence partly because its
|>|> citizens had just elected a radical mayor--demanded an
|>|> audience with government ministers, where they presented a
|>|> simple proposal: ...
olive...@tiscali.co.uk (Oliver Kamm):
| > | Note that these groupuscules demanded an audience with government
| > | ministers having been elected by no one and being accountable to no
| > | one. They are, in short, much less representative than the government
| > | leaders they riot against, and are not remotely accurately described
| > | as 'a democratic multitude'.
G*rd*n wrote:
| > According to the story, however, the groups were demanding
| > only ordinary rights of assembly and association, which had
| > been threatened by the said government ministers. Who they
| > were accountable to or represented was irrelevant.
Dan Clore <cl...@columbia-center.org>:
| In case you don't know, G*rd*n, Oliver Kamm is one of the
| trolls currently infesting alt.fan.noam-chomsky. It's no
| surprise to discover that his vision of democracy begins and
| ends at the ballot box, nor that he condemns the idea that
| one might request assurances that one will not be attacked
| for exercising the rights of free speech and assembly as an
| affront to their "democratic" authority.
Trolls can sometimes be used. In this case, Oliver obligingly
played the role of mainstream dogmadroner, putting forward
exactly the sort of line I'd expect to see from the mass media,
where the meaning of _democratic_ is reversed into "capitalist".
In popping off this move -- easy play -- I got a chance to
subvert the minds of all of the eight people who were reading
the thread, and sow doubt of the established order in their
ranks. Surely the revolution is just around the corner.
David Graeber
In article <40cd7d30.02112...@posting.google.com>,
olive...@tiscali.co.uk (Oliver Kamm) wrote:
I don't normally respond to trolls - it's perfectly
obvious Kamm is not on this newsgroup to engage in
discussion, but to prevent it, either by distracting
attention away from the purposes the newsgroup was
set up to serve (discussion of Chomsky's political
analyses and related libertarian socialist ideas) or
dissuading those who might be interested in finding out
what Chomsky's positions actually are from doing so.
Why anyone would spend hours of their work time every day
to _prevent_ discussion, endlessly repeating the exact
same bogus charges no matter how many times they have been
disproved, is an interesting question - in the absence of
some obsessive mental condition (always a possibility
on usenet), one has to wonder if someone is paying him to
do this. So playing along is playing into his hands -
really one should just ignore him. But the irony here
What I find interesting here is Kamm's support for
fascism. There is nothing Kamm likes so much as to
figure out some incredibly elaborate and labored way
to associate someone with Nazism (ie, they asked for
evidence when Kamm said someone else is pro-Nazi; they
cited a text cited on a series of different web sites
one of which is run by a Nazi, etc etc) - the moment
he can produce such a prize, he will hold it out
triumphantly and use it as a way to libel said
person every time their name appears on the
internet, saying "this person thinks the fact someone
is a Nazi is no big deal" or what have you. An
excellent way to prevent actual discussion of ideas
and positions, which is of course what Kamm is
(I suspect) being paid to do here.
So you'd imagine Kamm would be a real, major, anti-
fascist, huh? Not exactly. Consider his defense of
the Berlusconi government above. Berlusconi's coalition,
which received a plurality (not a majority) in the
general elections, despite the advantage of Berlusconi's
owning 60% of the Italian news media, is exactly that:
a coalition of parties. Prominent in the coalition is
the Alleanza Nazionale, which is variously described by
the foreign press as "ex-Fascist" or "neo-fascist",
and whose current leader, Gianfranco Fini, is currently
the deputy prime minister. The party traces its roots
directly back to Mussolini, recalls the former fascist
dictator fondly - Mussolini's daughter, in fact, is
a prominent party member and always celebrating her father's
legacy. While Kamm likes to represent matters as a
bunch of tiny undemocratic "groupsicles" (who somehow
managed to turn out 60 thousand _delegates_ to their
last meeting and put perhaps a million people in the
streets) "rioting" against their democratic representatives,
accounts in the Italian and international press after
Genoa revealed that Fini - who has, in the past, openly
called himself a fascist - took personal charge of much of
the "security" arrangements before the G8 summit in Genoa,
which, as it turns out, involved having the police work
with neo-nazi and fascist groups from across Europe
(interviews with such Nazis later appeared in
Italian and foreign newspapers, I particularly remember
a British Nazi who called himself "Snoopy" who admitted to
masquerading as an anarchist and wreaking havoc; he professed an
ardent admiration for Adolf Hitler) to act as provacateurs,
giving police an excuse to attack pretty much every
group of demonstrators they could find, ranging from
the pacifist Lilliput groups to feminist pagans doing
spiral dances to the padded Disobedienti, all of whom were
gassed and clubbed and many left seriously injured. (This
did eventually lead to street battles with enraged
protestors, though the protestors mainly struck back
against empty buildings; there were hundreds of seriously
injured protestors but I don't remember hearing anything
about seriously injured cops.) As Fini and other National
Alliance deputies dallied in Carabinieri HQ in Genoa,
arrestees were systematically beaten, made to stand for
hours on broken limbs, and otherwise tortured, and forced
to sing fascist anthems and shout fascist slogans.
A later investigation found serious abuses:
"Using physical evidence and eyewitness testimony, critics charge that the
Italian police engaged in systematic beatings and human rights abuses,
leading some to compare the conduct of the Italian police to the Chilean
security forces under Pinochet. At an August 3 press conference, lead
investigator Francesco
Meloni said' "The reports of violence, and the identical testimony of
scores of persons who passed through jails in diverse hours and days
during the G-8, suggest a systematic method of torture and genuine
violations of human rights."
(http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/Fascism/Fascism_Face_Genoa.html)
I could go on, and talk about the posters of Hitler and
Mussolini observed in Genoa police stations, or the spectre
of Italian police (and this I saw myself) all raising their
arms in fascist salutes to intimidate protestors. But the
point is pretty simple. Here we aren't talking about some
net loony who runs a white supremacist web page - evil
and dangerous though such a person undoubtedly is, they
are pretty small fry, probably lucky to have a dozen followers
if that - but a real, genuine, fascist party, the kind that
actually could seize power, that actually has seized a share
of power through its alliance with an extreme
right-wing government, engaged in the classic Nazi techniques
of instigating brutal violence against political dissidents
and then manipulating the media to blame the victims. And
Kamm is totally behind them.
Of course in Florence the police did not attack or use
provacateurs so everything went peacefully, demonstrating
clearly who the actual "rioters" are.
But here's the point. Kamm will bend reality and logic
into pretzels to associate those whose opinions he
dislikes with Nazis, even what's probably some isolated
nazi crazy with no political power. But when Nazis actually do
achieve some kind of political power - they become part of a
government (even though the party of Fini and Mussolini
received far smaller a percentage of the vote, this
time 'round, than Hitler did when he became Chancellor)
then lo! Kamm is their supporter. If it's a contest between
those who believe in direct democracy and fascists who believe
in employing thugs (some police, some nazi youth just along
for the ride) to assault and torture them - well, Kamm
is on the side of the Nazis. He doesn't just cite their
web pages. He actively supports them and justifies their
violence against political dissidents.
I strongly suggest people on this group to follow Kamm's
lead, and to do what he would have done - to make sure
that any time his name is mentioned or he suggests any
opinion ever again, we all immediately reply that he is
a person who supports violence on the part of fascists and
nazis. That's all we should say about him. That's it.
Kamm: backer of fascist violence. Kamm: supporter of
Mussolini (Mussolini the younger, anyway). Kamm: who believes
a nazi is a legitimate member of a democratic government.
Kamm: who believes that when nazis torture people under
portraits of Mussolini, that's a legitimate expression
of democracy - far more legitimate, apparently, than
insisting on your right to hold a conference on how to
create new more democratic institutions even though the
fascists try to stop you. Kamm: pro-Nazi.
DG
Brain Death
wrote:
>I don't normally respond to trolls - it's perfectly
>obvious Kamm is not on this newsgroup to engage in
>discussion, but to prevent it, either by distracting
>attention away from the purposes the newsgroup was
>set up to serve (discussion of Chomsky's political
>analyses and related libertarian socialist ideas)
Libertarian socialist? Now that is an interesting oxymoron!
BD
Guilherme C Roschke
> >obvious Kamm is not on this newsgroup to engage in
> >discussion, but to prevent it, either by distracting
> >attention away from the purposes the newsgroup was
> >set up to serve (discussion of Chomsky's political
> >analyses and related libertarian socialist ideas)
>
> Libertarian socialist? Now that is an interesting oxymoron!
>
-gr
Oliver Kamm
"David Graeber" <dgra...@rcn.net> wrote in message
news:dgraeber-301...@204-74-0-116.c3-0.nyw-ubr2.nyr-nyw.ny.cable.r
cn.com...
>
> I don't normally respond to trolls - it's perfectly
> obvious Kamm is not on this newsgroup to engage in
> discussion, but to prevent it, either by distracting
> attention away from the purposes the newsgroup was
> set up to serve (discussion of Chomsky's political
> analyses and related libertarian socialist ideas) or
> dissuading those
[snip]
It is a pleasure to exchange words with Mr Graeber after a long absence
since he left the Chomsky ng. The last time we did so he got into a terrible
muddle over the enlightening concept that a country's current account is -
w'addya know? - balanced by its capital account: hence the term 'balance of
payments'. I hope that in the intervening years Mr Graeber has managed to
hone his skills in the esoteric branch of knowledge (i.e. simple arithmetic)
that escaped him then.
Unfortunately, the ability to structure an argument and assemble empirical
evidence still eludes him. My only comment - ever, to my recollection -
about the Berlusconi administration is that it is the elected government of
Italy, having won the support of the electorate (and I carefully didn't say,
when making such a reference, that it had won the majority of the vote: this
rarely happens in advanced democracies, other than under electoral systems
such as the French that deliberately engineer such an outcome). It thus has
democratic legitimacy, whereas the anti-Third World campaigners (except that
they call themselves anti-globalisation campaigners, the better to avoid
thinking about their culpability in campaigning for increased poverty in the
Third World) have none. I do not begrudge them the right to demonstrate
peacefully, but it is a matter of observation that they don't generally do
so; in the circumstances they have been treated with great fairness and
leniency.
I should add that, for all my affection for Mr Graeber, the sight of a rich
kid with an embarrassing lack of economic awareness campaigning for the
Third World to be denied the means of lifting itself out of poverty is not
one that elevates. That he should then complain because he hasn't been
treated with the deference and gentility he believes he merits is, however,
very funny indeed. Go, Italian police.
Josh Dougherty
the uniquely American, and sheltered, impression that the term "Libertarian"
implies the same as "Anarcho-capitalist".
Josh
James A. Donald
Guilherme C Roschke
> try googling it.
The fact that lots of people call themselves libertarian socialists
does not make it any the less an oxymoron.
As I say in my web page http://www.jim.com/cat/blood.htm :
As usual, Catalonia demonstrated once again the contradiction between
liberty and socialism, with the usual rivers of blood that accompany
such demonstrations: To the extent that they were libertarian, they
were not socialist, and to the extent that they were socialist, they
were not libertarian.
Publius2k
***
> Dan Clore <cl...@columbia-center.org>:
> | In case you don't know, G*rd*n, Oliver Kamm is one of the
> | trolls currently infesting alt.fan.noam-chomsky. It's no
> | surprise to discover that his vision of democracy begins and
> | ends at the ballot box, nor that he condemns the idea that
> | one might request assurances that one will not be attacked
> | for exercising the rights of free speech and assembly as an
> | affront to their "democratic" authority.
>
> Trolls can sometimes be used. In this case, Oliver obligingly
> played the role of mainstream dogmadroner, putting forward
> exactly the sort of line I'd expect to see from the mass media,
> where the meaning of _democratic_ is reversed into "capitalist".
> In popping off this move -- easy play -- I got a chance to
> subvert the minds of all of the eight people who were reading
> the thread, and sow doubt of the established order in their
> ranks. Surely the revolution is just around the corner.
:)
Guilherme C Roschke
>
> The fact that lots of people call themselves libertarian socialists
> does not make it any the less an oxymoron.
>
> As I say in my web page http://www.jim.com/cat/blood.htm :
>
> As usual, Catalonia demonstrated once again the contradiction between
> liberty and socialism, with the usual rivers of blood that accompany
> such demonstrations: To the extent that they were libertarian, they
> were not socialist, and to the extent that they were socialist, they
> were not libertarian.
like the factory workers taking over in argentina. or maybe not
like them.
-gr
David Graeber
<jgl...@letsroll.com> wrote:
Try checking out the history of the term
"libertarian".
DG
David Graeber
<olive...@tiscali.co.uk> wrote:
> "David Graeber" <dgra...@rcn.net> wrote in message
> news:dgraeber-301...@204-74-0-116.c3-0.nyw-ubr2.nyr-nyw.ny.cable.r
> cn.com...
> >
> > I don't normally respond to trolls - it's perfectly
> > obvious Kamm is not on this newsgroup to engage in
> > discussion, but to prevent it, either by distracting
> > attention away from the purposes the newsgroup was
> > set up to serve (discussion of Chomsky's political
> > analyses and related libertarian socialist ideas) or
> > dissuading those
>
> [snip]
>
> It is a pleasure to exchange words with Mr Graeber after a long absence
> since he left the Chomsky ng. The last time we did so he got into a terrible
> muddle over the enlightening concept that a country's current account is -
> w'addya know? - balanced by its capital account: hence the term 'balance of
> payments'. I hope that in the intervening years Mr Graeber has managed to
> hone his skills in the esoteric branch of knowledge (i.e. simple arithmetic)
> that escaped him then.
This is clearly a figment of the fascist-supporter's
imagination: the only exchange about economics
I ever had with him turned on his (feigned I believe)
ignorance of the common usage of the term "neo-classical".
>
> Unfortunately, the ability to structure an argument and assemble empirical
> evidence still eludes him. My only comment - ever, to my recollection -
> about the Berlusconi administration is that it is the elected government of
> Italy, having won the support of the electorate (and I carefully didn't say,
> when making such a reference, that it had won the majority of the vote: this
> rarely happens in advanced democracies, other than under electoral systems
> such as the French that deliberately engineer such an outcome). It thus has
> democratic legitimacy, whereas the anti-Third World campaigners (except that
> they call themselves anti-globalisation campaigners, the better to avoid
> thinking about their culpability in campaigning for increased poverty in the
> Third World) have none. I do not begrudge them the right to demonstrate
> peacefully, but it is a matter of observation that they don't generally do
> so; in the circumstances they have been treated with great fairness and
> leniency.
>
> I should add that, for all my affection for Mr Graeber, the sight of a rich
> kid with an embarrassing lack of economic awareness campaigning for the
> Third World to be denied the means of lifting itself out of poverty is not
> one that elevates. That he should then complain because he hasn't been
> treated with the deference and gentility he believes he merits is, however,
> very funny indeed. Go, Italian police.
Rich kid? The fascist-sympathizing troll is now reduced
to simply making things up. Actually my father was a
plate-stripper and my mother a seamstress but what this
has to do with anything is beyond me. Just a desperate
attempt to come up with some smear or personal slur to
throw out by someone caught with his pro-Nazi
pants down. Notice how in the whole post, he does not -
despite the obvious challenge - manage to bring himself
to say a single word disassociating himself from the
fascist party in Berlusconi's coalition or the fascist
activities of the Italian police, much less condemning
their brutal behavior. My accusations of Kamm's fascist
sympathies are entirely confirmed.
As for my "ignorance" - well, I would ask the troll
what university conveyed a Ph.D. on _him_ and where he
is currently a professor - why he, the know-it-all, is
reduced to posting hysterical smears to usenet while I the
ignorant fool somehow got to be a professor at Yale - but
why bother? No one takes Kamm seriously. What most people were
not fully aware of were his active sympathy for and
support for fascists and nazis. Having pointed this out,
I must return to my actual job which is teaching and
researching on subjects about which our nazi-loving
troll is so embarrassingly ignorant he probably doesn't
even know they exist.
Bye all,
DG
David Graeber
Just for documentary purposes, before signing off from this
discussion, I would like to point out for the benefit of
anyone our neighborhood troll Kamm slanders on some bizarre
bogus charge as a sympathizer with Nazis in the future,
that by now, Kamm has now openly admitted to supporting
both overt fascists and overtly fascist tactics as
practiced by fascists. Since Kamm is an extremely stupid
person it is actually pretty easy to goad him into
displaying his true colors. I'm afraid it will be necessary
to include the full text Kamm is responding to (sorry
about the space) in order for people to see clearly
just how openly Kamm has now admitted to supporting
fascism.
------
the original post
------
I don't normally respond to trolls - it's perfectly
obvious Kamm is not on this newsgroup to engage in
discussion, but to prevent it, either by distracting
attention away from the purposes the newsgroup was
set up to serve (discussion of Chomsky's political
analyses and related libertarian socialist ideas) or
---------
---------
now here is Kamm's bizarre, incoherent reply:
> [snip]
>
> It is a pleasure to exchange words with Mr Graeber after a long absence
> since he left the Chomsky ng. The last time we did so he got into a terrible
> muddle over the enlightening concept that a country's current account is -
> w'addya know? - balanced by its capital account: hence the term 'balance of
> payments'. I hope that in the intervening years Mr Graeber has managed to
> hone his skills in the esoteric branch of knowledge (i.e. simple arithmetic)
> that escaped him then.
Ignorant? Kamm is ignorant of his own posts! No such
discussion took place and a simple check of the archives
(check under "Kamm, Graeber, balance of payments" for
example) will show this to be the case. The usual pathetic
slurs with no content. If the man was capable of
embarrassment he would be weeping now but clearly he is
doesn't care how many times he is caught lying or making
a fool of himself, so long as he can disrupt the group and
prevent people from actually learning something about the
subject
>
> Unfortunately, the ability to structure an argument and assemble empirical
> evidence still eludes him. My only comment - ever, to my recollection -
> about the Berlusconi administration is that it is the elected government of
> Italy, having won the support of the electorate (and I carefully didn't say,
> when making such a reference, that it had won the majority of the vote: this
> rarely happens in advanced democracies, other than under electoral systems
> such as the French that deliberately engineer such an outcome). It thus has
> democratic legitimacy, whereas the anti-Third World campaigners (except that
> they call themselves anti-globalisation campaigners, the better to avoid
> thinking about their culpability in campaigning for increased poverty in the
> Third World) have none. I do not begrudge them the right to demonstrate
> peacefully, but it is a matter of observation that they don't generally do
> so; in the circumstances they have been treated with great fairness and
> leniency.
Well, if you consider torturing pacifists to be
"fairness and leniency", sure. Well, I guess one does,
if one is, as Kamm has now revealed himself to be,
a Nazi. (See below)
>
> I should add that, for all my affection for Mr Graeber, the sight of a rich
> kid with an embarrassing lack of economic awareness campaigning for the
> Third World to be denied the means of lifting itself out of poverty is not
> one that elevates. That he should then complain because he hasn't been
> treated with the deference and gentility he believes he merits is, however,
> very funny indeed. Go, Italian police.
As I remarked in a different post, the "rich kid" slur
is something Kamm apparently just made up off the top of
his head - in fact my dad was a plate-stripper and my mom
for many years a seamstress. He also has no idea what
economic policies I advocate, other than that I oppose the
IMF, so unless he believes that no policy other than the
current IMF policy could possibly help the poor in the global
south (eventually - it surely hasn't done so yet!) he is just,
as usual, making things up. But here's the critical thing. The
ending. Here Kamm just can't help himself. I have documented
that
(a) a significant portion of Berlusconi's coalition is
made up of overt, self-declared fascists
(b) those fascists were involved in planning the
police policy in Genoa
(c) that police policy involved intentionally using
fascists and nazis from Italy and abroad as provacateurs,
then directly assaulting protestors, including the vast
majority of strictly non-violent ones; in one particularly
bloody raid, using sticks and clubs to shatter bones
and teeth of over a hundred activists who they found
sleeping in a local schoolroom, offering no resistance
whatever, putting all of them in the hospital and leaving
clots of blood, flesh and teeth littered all over the
building...
(d) that they then proceeded, with the help of their
fascist auxiliaries, to systematically torture those they
had arrested, while touting fascist symbols and shouting
fascist slogans, or forcing their victims to shout them
as they beat them
And what is Kamm's reply? "Go Italian police!"
So he admits it. He is in favor of fascism. All this
nonsense about accusing others of being Nazis is nonsense.
He's the Nazi. When members of Mussolini's party order
the Italian police to join with Nazis to kick in the
teeth of sleeping protestors, or to break their bones
while demanding they chant "vive il duce" or whatever,
Kamm's response: "go Italian police." He admits it. He's
a Nazi and he thinks that it's a fine thing when Nazi's
beat and torture people.
I'm out of here - but please, guys, don't let him
forget it. He has admitted to being pro-Nazi. That is all
anyone should ever say to him ever again.
DG
iHÄž
wrote:
[big snip]
> And what is Kamm's reply? "Go Italian police!"
> So he admits it. He is in favor of fascism. All this
>nonsense about accusing others of being Nazis is nonsense.
>He's the Nazi. When members of Mussolini's party order
>the Italian police to join with Nazis to kick in the
>teeth of sleeping protestors, or to break their bones
>while demanding they chant "vive il duce" or whatever,
>Kamm's response: "go Italian police." He admits it. He's
>a Nazi and he thinks that it's a fine thing when Nazi's
>beat and torture people.
>
> I'm out of here - but please, guys, don't let him
>forget it. He has admitted to being pro-Nazi. That is all
>anyone should ever say to him ever again.
> DG
This will do nicely, David. ;-)
Oliver Kamm
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.
[snip]
> Ignorant? Kamm is ignorant of his own posts! No such
> discussion took place and a simple check of the archives
> (check under "Kamm, Graeber, balance of payments" for
> example) will show this to be the case. The usual pathetic
> slurs with no content. If the man was capable of
> embarrassment he would be weeping now but clearly he is
> doesn't care how many times he is caught lying or making
> a fool of himself, so long as he can disrupt the group and
> prevent people from actually learning something about the
> subject
This is delightful: Graeber confirms my point exactly by showing that,
extraordinarily, he still hasn't worked out what a balance of payments
is; he doesn't even know what the term means. If he had tried entering
'Graeber, Kamm, imports, capital' he would have come up with the
exchange he seeks, and rather devastating it is too. It demonstrated
he hadn't worked out that a country that runs a current account
deficit must simultaneously be a net importer of capital. Amusingly
enough, Graeber then insisted that I address him as 'Dr Graeber';
facts are inconvenient things, and they're always liable to smoke out
someone of intellectual insecurity like Graeber.
>
> >
> > Unfortunately, the ability to structure an argument and assemble empirical
> > evidence still eludes him. My only comment - ever, to my recollection -
> > about the Berlusconi administration is that it is the elected government of
> > Italy, having won the support of the electorate (and I carefully didn't say,
> > when making such a reference, that it had won the majority of the vote: this
> > rarely happens in advanced democracies, other than under electoral systems
> > such as the French that deliberately engineer such an outcome). It thus has
> > democratic legitimacy, whereas the anti-Third World campaigners (except that
> > they call themselves anti-globalisation campaigners, the better to avoid
> > thinking about their culpability in campaigning for increased poverty in the
> > Third World) have none. I do not begrudge them the right to demonstrate
> > peacefully, but it is a matter of observation that they don't generally do
> > so; in the circumstances they have been treated with great fairness and
> > leniency.
>
>
> Well, if you consider torturing pacifists to be
> "fairness and leniency", sure. Well, I guess one does,
> if one is, as Kamm has now revealed himself to be,
> a Nazi. (See below)
Poor dears. Did they expect to be able to attack people and property
without hindrance?
>
>
> >
> > I should add that, for all my affection for Mr Graeber, the sight of a rich
> > kid with an embarrassing lack of economic awareness campaigning for the
> > Third World to be denied the means of lifting itself out of poverty is not
> > one that elevates. That he should then complain because he hasn't been
> > treated with the deference and gentility he believes he merits is, however,
> > very funny indeed. Go, Italian police.
>
> As I remarked in a different post, the "rich kid" slur
> is something Kamm apparently just made up off the top of
> his head - in fact my dad was a plate-stripper and my mom
> for many years a seamstress. He also has no idea what
> economic policies I advocate, other than that I oppose the
> IMF, so unless he believes that no policy other than the
> current IMF policy could possibly help the poor in the global
> south (eventually - it surely hasn't done so yet!) he is just,
> as usual, making things up.
Here's someone who lives on an Ivy League campus boasting of his hard
life while demanding the developing world doesn't have the ability to
specialise in its areas of comparative advantage and thereby improve
their standards of living. I make no value judgement on this, I merely
report the facts.
But here's the critical thing. The
> ending. Here Kamm just can't help himself.
[snip incoherent flail]
Graeber notes with his usual striking investigative work that I
support the Italian police in defending the rule of law against mobs.
Dead right I do, because I'm a supporter of democratic government, the
rule of law and - incidentally - Third World development. I am, in
short, a leftist of democratic views. Members of the various ngs will
note that, having had it pointed out to him that I have never at any
time expressed support for the parties that make up the current
Italian government, Graeber decides not to answer the point but to
scuttle. Nuff said, and not a surprise.
Oliver Kamm
>
> This is clearly a figment of the fascist-supporter's
> imagination: the only exchange about economics
> I ever had with him turned on his (feigned I believe)
> ignorance of the common usage of the term "neo-classical".
Graeber has a usefully selective memory, and it gives me no pleasure
to remind him of his howlers. He welcomed as an entirely appropriate
contribution to the ng we were engaged in the incoherent delusion that
a country with a crrent account deficit (viz. the US) simultaneously
was a net exporter of capital to set up industrial plants overseas and
exploit the impoverished masses etc etc. All stuff that is not only
factually inaccurate but is ARITHMETICALLY IMPOSSIBLE. Graeber
complains that I have applied the term 'ignorance' to him; I don't
think I have, but if I have it is undeniably an accurate designation.
Almost as amusing is his belief that post-Keynesian economic theory
(about which I particpated in some mailing list discussions, which
Graeber being a curiously obsessive man found on entering my name into
a search engine) is a branch of neo-classical economics. I'd encourage
Graeber to keep posting this type of stuff; there has been little to
laugh about in the past 15 months, and he certainly has the ability to
provide it.
>
> Rich kid?
Yup. A tenured Ivy League academic telling the Third World they
mustn't try to better themselves.
The fascist-sympathizing troll is now reduced
> to simply making things up. Actually my father was a
> plate-stripper and my mother a seamstress but what this
> has to do with anything is beyond me. Just a desperate
> attempt to come up with some smear or personal slur to
> throw out by someone caught with his pro-Nazi
> pants down.
Just a point of factual information.
Notice how in the whole post, he does not -
> despite the obvious challenge - manage to bring himself
> to say a single word disassociating himself from the
> fascist party in Berlusconi's coalition or the fascist
> activities of the Italian police, much less condemning
> their brutal behavior. My accusations of Kamm's fascist
> sympathies are entirely confirmed.
Unsurprisingly, Graeber, having failed to find (and believe me he's
looked) a single statement of mine expressing support for Berlusconi,
attempts the cunning - actually rather dumb - elision whereby the
police become honorary members of the governing coalition. I certainly
support the police, who seem to me to have behaved with great leniency
against a rioting mob, and certainly support the sovereignty of
democratic government, while opposing the particular political parties
that constitute the current government. Graeber is so confused about
political concepts that he assumes that if you're a democrat you must,
ex hypothesi, support the parties that exercise government in a
democracy. We're not in Iraq here, old bean - much as you might regret
it.
> As for my "ignorance" - well, I would ask the troll
> what university conveyed a Ph.D. on _him_ and where he
> is currently a professor - why he, the know-it-all, is
> reduced to posting hysterical smears to usenet while I the
> ignorant fool somehow got to be a professor at Yale - but
> why bother? No one takes Kamm seriously. What most people were
> not fully aware of were his active sympathy for and
> support for fascists and nazis. Having pointed this out,
> I must return to my actual job which is teaching and
> researching on subjects about which our nazi-loving
> troll is so embarrassingly ignorant he probably doesn't
> even know they exist.
> Bye all,
> DG
Well, well, well: here is someone with an advanced case of
intellectual insecurity. I've noticed it before: Graeber just can't
stop telling us that he's an academic, presumably on the grounds that
we'd never be able to work it out otherwise. Suffice to say that his
subject is anthropology (I know this because he can't stop telling us
), not politics or economics, which are subjects about which he
certainly, demonstrably and comprehensively lacks not only training
but knowledge, erudition and insight. These are not soft subjects, Mr
Graeber: they involve empirical research, and it's time you buckled
down and attempted to get to grips with them if you wish to contribute
to these ngs.
Dan Clore
And the history of the term "socialist".
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
All my fiction through 2001 and more. Intro by S.T. Joshi.
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
Lord We˙rdgliffe and Necronomicon Page:
Guilherme C Roschke
> > "fairness and leniency", sure. Well, I guess one does,
> > if one is, as Kamm has now revealed himself to be,
> > a Nazi. (See below)
>
>
> Poor dears. Did they expect to be able to attack people and property
> without hindrance?
kamm, i know your mental health might require you to refuse to
believe this, but for the record, vast amounts if not all of the beaten
and tortured were pacifists, of the sorts engaged in big, safe, and some
might even say boring marches. while quite a bit of the destruction came
from agent provacateurs.
-gr
David Graeber
Guilherme C Roschke <gros...@luminousvoid.net> wrote:
> > > Well, if you consider torturing pacifists to be
> > > "fairness and leniency", sure. Well, I guess one does,
> > > if one is, as Kamm has now revealed himself to be,
> > > a Nazi. (See below)
> >
> >
> > Poor dears. Did they expect to be able to attack people and property
> > without hindrance?
>
> kamm, i know your mental health might require you to refuse to
> believe this,
What Kamm "believes" is irrelevant. He's
just here to attack and he obviously doesn't
care whether what he says is true.
but for the record, vast amounts if not all of the beaten
> and tortured were pacifists, of the sorts engaged in big, safe, and some
> might even say boring marches. while quite a bit of the destruction came
> from agent provacateurs.
Yes, members of the several-hundred-strong
(out of 300,000) actual Black Bloc, that did
attack some buildings - mainly the empty office
buiding used by prison administrators - were
not "hindered" in any way, since their activities
were felt to provide an excuse for the police and
their nazi and fascist allies to assault, arrest,
and torture the pacifists. By pretending that
everyone attacked and tortured must have been
rioters, despite the fact that every outside
observer including Italian parlaimentary investigators
determined this was not the case, Kamm shows he
prefers to repeat the fascist propaganda line,
yet again revealing his true political sympathies
and actively supporting the ability of fascists
to torture dissidents under pictures of Mussolini
and so forth). Kamm just keeps digging himself deeper
and deeper.
I thought I was going to drop out but
it was so much fun to watch Kamm cheerleading
Nazis because he's just too aggressive and nasty
to cover his own ass ("Kamm: a man who believes a
Nazi is just a legitimate democrat. Kamm: a man
who thinks Nazis torturing political dissidents
is just democratic police work..." Where do you
stop?) I couldn't help myself.
Now I'll go. Work to do...
David
brian turner
> ["anti-globalists" protest] for the
> Third World to be denied the means of lifting itself out of poverty
This bunch does include many with no understanding (or interest,
likely) of development economics, but others do, and do not take the
simplistic across the board anti-foreign direct investment view you
are broadbrusing all with; instead, the more intelligent among them
take a similar nuanced view of FDI that the Asian tigers took to
develop.
David Graeber
olive...@tiscali.co.uk (Oliver Kamm) wrote:
> dgra...@rcn.net (David Graeber) wrote in message
news:<dgraeber-011...@204-74-0-116.c3-0.nyw-ubr2.nyr-nyw.ny.cable.rcn.com>...
> >
> > This is clearly a figment of the fascist-supporter's
> > imagination: the only exchange about economics
> > I ever had with him turned on his (feigned I believe)
> > ignorance of the common usage of the term "neo-classical".
>
> Graeber has a usefully selective memory, and it gives me no pleasure
> to remind him of his howlers. He welcomed as an entirely appropriate
> contribution to the ng we were engaged in the incoherent delusion that
> a country with a crrent account deficit (viz. the US) simultaneously
> was a net exporter of capital to set up industrial plants overseas and
> exploit the impoverished masses etc etc. All stuff that is not only
> factually inaccurate but is ARITHMETICALLY IMPOSSIBLE. Graeber
> complains that I have applied the term 'ignorance' to him; I don't
> think I have, but if I have it is undeniably an accurate designation.
> Almost as amusing is his belief that post-Keynesian economic theory
> (about which I particpated in some mailing list discussions, which
> Graeber being a curiously obsessive man found on entering my name into
> a search engine) is a branch of neo-classical economics. I'd encourage
> Graeber to keep posting this type of stuff; there has been little to
> laugh about in the past 15 months, and he certainly has the ability to
> provide it.
Having been caught once again being made a fool of
claiming that I made an argument I didn't make, the
pathetic Kamm is now reduced to claiming that I
_didn't_ _object_ to someone else's making it! I never
had any discussion with Kamm about balance of payments
issues and he realizes now that he has been caught in
an outright lie. This is his desperate way to try to
save face from being once again entirely humiliated.
>
>
> >
> > Rich kid?
>
> Yup. A tenured Ivy League academic telling the Third World they
> mustn't try to better themselves.
>
The man really does have no sense of embarrassment
or shame - no matter how many times he's caught in a
lie or fabrication, he just makes up a new one. After having
made up the fact that I'm a rich kid (on the assumption
that I probably am because I teach at Yale), and discovering
that my parents were working class, he declares I'm
a tenured Ivy League academic so that's the same thing.
But once again in a desperate attempt to cover his own
humiliation he simply humiliates himself again by inventing
more facts which turn out to be untrue. No, actually, I'm not
tenured. On what basis did he think I was? None. He just
made it up. You see? He has absolutely no idea what he's talking
about. And of course if he were to reply to this, he'd then say
it doesn't matter because I still teach at Yale. But the fact remains
he's fabricated two lies in a row, one to cover up the
other, and shown us all how much we can believe anything
he says.
>
> The fascist-sympathizing troll is now reduced
> > to simply making things up. Actually my father was a
> > plate-stripper and my mother a seamstress but what this
> > has to do with anything is beyond me. Just a desperate
> > attempt to come up with some smear or personal slur to
> > throw out by someone caught with his pro-Nazi
> > pants down.
>
> Just a point of factual information.
No, actually it's a libel, since you made it
up to try to assassinate someone's character and
it turns out not to be true.
>
>
> Notice how in the whole post, he does not -
> > despite the obvious challenge - manage to bring himself
> > to say a single word disassociating himself from the
> > fascist party in Berlusconi's coalition or the fascist
> > activities of the Italian police, much less condemning
> > their brutal behavior. My accusations of Kamm's fascist
> > sympathies are entirely confirmed.
>
> Unsurprisingly, Graeber, having failed to find (and believe me he's
> looked) a single statement of mine expressing support for Berlusconi,
> attempts the cunning - actually rather dumb - elision whereby the
> police become honorary members of the governing coalition. I certainly
> support the police, who seem to me to have behaved with great leniency
> against a rioting mob, and certainly support the sovereignty of
> democratic government, while opposing the particular political parties
> that constitute the current government. Graeber is so confused about
> political concepts that he assumes that if you're a democrat you must,
> ex hypothesi, support the parties that exercise government in a
> democracy. We're not in Iraq here, old bean - much as you might regret
> it.
No, you didn't support Berlusconi, who is extremely
right-wing but not an overt fascist. Instead, you
supported the policies and actions of the Italian
police at Genoa, after I had explained that what they
did was planned by the openly fascist element in
Berlusconi's coalition and carried out by fascist
sympathizers (Italian police used fascist salutes,
had swastikas and pictures of Mussolini on the walls
of their stations, forced protestors to shout fascist
slogans and sing fascist songs...) with the help of
actual fascist and nazi youth groups from across
Europe. _These_ were the people Kamm is supporting,
responding to these descriptions of their political
affiliations and activities with the words "Go Italian
police!" We caught you, Ollie. You lose. You've
finally admitted what you actually are. From now on
everyone will know that you are a supporter of nazis
and a cheerleader for overt fascists when they torture
dissidents and be assured no one will be allowed to
forget it. Your cover is blown. You are a nazi supporter
and you might as well go home and find another
occupation than trolling usenet because the cat is
out of the bag now.
Nice try, coming from someone who has been now
revealed to be an open liar (so much for empirical
research - you don't get far in actual scholarship
if you make facts up off the top of your head. That's
because in actual scholarship, unlike Usenet, if
you get caught lying or fabricating data you
actually get in trouble and can't just go on
as if nothing happened. There's a reason people like
Kamm stay in venues with no intellectual standards
whatever. He's too much a coward to step out into
a field of actual debate where one is judged by
the community of one's peers. Anyway he clearly
isn't intellectually qualified to enter). Note
too how the troll does not, in fact, respond to the
challenge to state his actual qualifications in
economics - despite the fact that pretty much his
only two moves on the internet are (1) "I am trained
in economics and you're not, therefore if you
disagree with any reactionary policy I endorse you are
an ignorant fool", and (2) "wait! I can figure out some way
to associate you with Nazism. I can! I can!" But what
training does Kamm actually have in economics? Any?
Does the man even have a M.A.? Does he even have a
B.A.? Challenged to state his qualifications, he further
humiliates himself by offering nothing - one can only
conclude he has no actual qualifications in economics
of any kind. Or that if he does, they are so
negligible he is embarrassed to mention them.
Maybe he's read a few books. But this makes sense:
after all, real economic training is highly marketable
and if Kamm actually were a fully qualified economist
he could, no doubt, get a much better job than trolling
usenet and facing the daily humiliation of being
caught lying, being caught supporting fascism, being
caught making a fool of himself. It's pretty sad to
be reduced to being a professional slanderer. ("What
do you do for a living, daddy?" "Um, I troll usenet
and pretend to be an economist and make up lies about
people.") But such is the fate I guess of those who
cannot cut it in the world of knowledge and ideas.
Wouldn't normally get personal but since that's all
that Kamm ever does it seems entirely justified.
Or does Kamm actually have a job? It's possible
I am simply wrong to extrapolate from his silence
but it's the only thing one can reasonably conclude
given the evidence presented.
A final note - I really have better things to
do with my time but it's so much fun watching Kamm
flail about humiliating himself, digging himself
deeper and deeper... - so, note how hilarious it
is to see Kamm accusing me, a poor kid who managed
to work himself into a decent job, with being an
elitist. His entire act is based on presumed elitism.
His entire philosophy is elitist. After all, the
movement he slanders as being dedicated to undermining
the economic prospects for poor people in the global
south actually _began_ in the global south, and insofar
as it is actually about people in the north intervening
on their behalf (this is a minor element, really)
those people are simply conveying the positions held
by those organizations which actually represent poor
people in the global south. You do not see any
organizations of poor people in the global south
actually _supporting_ IMF policies. So what does
Kamm's position come down to? "I am a highly trained economist
(except of course, I'm not really a highly trained economist)
and therefore I know better what is good for these
poor people than they do. Poor people are stupid
and do not know what's good for them. They should
shut up and let members of the elite of highly trained
economists such as myself (except of course I'm not
really a highly trained economist) make all decisions for
them. Under no conditions should the majority of poor
people have any say in public policy because they are
too stupid. Democracy, for instance, in which the
majority elect a government which then carries out
the economic policies that majority prefers must not
occur. This makes his defense of Berlusconi as the
people's choice particularly hilarious, since Kamm
is openly opposed to democracy elsewhere, at least
insofar as it involves economic policy, which must be
left to the trained elite such as himself (except,
of course, he is not really a member of that
trained elite at all). Kamm has even gone so far as
to say that debt relief for desperately poor countries
would be 'bad for the poor' because it would mean
IMF economists would no longer would have so much ability
to tell their governments how to run their economies -
ie, it might allow the poor to have some say in
economic policy (if only through elected representatives)
and since the poor are stupid and could not possibly
know what's good for them, that in itself would be bad for
the poor.
Kamm incidentally knows nothing of my own positions;
the issue I've mainly emphasized in my own writings
is about immigration: that is, if we were serious
about globalization, we should lift border restrictions
and allow people to live anywhere they want. If
this is anti-poor, as Kamm has asserted my positions
are, this would have to mean that Kamm believes that
it is for the benefit of poor people in Bangladesh
or Uganda that we do not allow them to move to
Europe or the U.S., and that it would hurt them
terribly to give them this freedom. Once again, the
poor must be too stupid to know what's good for them.
But Kamm knows, being a brilliant economist (except of
course he's not really a brilliant economist, or
apparently, an economist at all). I might note that mine
is hardly an isolated position: the need to open borders
was the main theme of the Genoa protests as well.
Apparently we are all destroying economic opportunities
for the poor by suggesting they should have free choice
in where they want to live.
I should probably also point out I don't myself
subscribe to Kamm's elitism - I know that it's
perfectly possible for someone who loves knowledge
to teach themselves a discipline, even outside
academia, and learn it just as well or better than
academics. I am just pointing out the complete
incoherence of his own positions. For instance, he
will insist that anyone with the slightest knowledge
of economics would know that position A is laughable,
insane, etc etc. Then if you look into the matter
you will almost invariably find that there are in
fact economists - real economists, with actual
economic training, who unlike Kamm had to pass
difficult exams and have research papers graded by
other trained economists, who had to publish in peer-
reviewed journals, whose work has (unike Kamm's
ravings) had to pass judgment by scholars who know the
field backwards and forwards and have the power
to flunk or censure you if you lie or make up data - who come
to exactly the opposite conclusions. Economists are
hardly a uniform lot. While there are many economists
who avidly support IMF or World Bank positions -
not surprising, considering so many economists are
employed by the IMF or institutions with similar
interests and philosophies - there are plenty of
real economists who avidly oppose them. And many who
have gone from one side to the other. Take the
example of George Stiglitz, who used to be the chief
economist for the World Bank - a man who rose to
the very top of the economic field, where Kamm's
position (with apparently no academic qualifications,
no publications, no intellectual recognition, reduced
to writing only for public forums with no academic
standards and lying his head off on those) seems
to define the very nadir. But he quit the World Bank
in disgust and has since spent his time demonstrating
the extreme economic destructiveness of structural
adjustment policies. Now, if I were to post a few
of Stiglitz' positions to the list (just the positions,
without mentioning the source) Kamm would instantly
appear to declare how embarrassingly ignorant they were
are of even the basics of economic theory, how no one
who knew anything about the subject would possibly
see them as anything but pathetic and ignorant. That's all
he ever does. But that's why he's too much of a coward
to appear on any forum where intellectual standards
are actually enforced - in a real debate, in a real
scholarly forum, before real trained economists, someone
like Stiglitz - a _real_ economist, with real training
and accomplishments - would rip a fraud like Kamm to
shreds in 30 seconds.
Okay, enough of this. I am really writing this just
to procrastinate - I'm supposed to be working on an
essay on value theory for the journal of Fernand
Braudel society, ironically enough - but since people
were encouraging me to further Kamm's humiliation
a bit a took some time off. Now I really do have to
go. Been fun guys. And remember: Kamm has now admitted
to supporting Nazism.
DG
Oliver Kamm
> Well, well, well: here is someone with an advanced case of
> intellectual insecurity. I've noticed it before: Graeber just can't
> stop telling us that he's an academic, presumably on the grounds that
> we'd never be able to work it out otherwise. Suffice to say that his
> subject is anthropology (I know this because he can't stop telling us
> ), not politics or economics, which are subjects about which he
> certainly, demonstrably and comprehensively lacks not only training
> but knowledge, erudition and insight. These are not soft subjects, Mr
> Graeber: they involve empirical research, and it's time you buckled
> down and attempted to get to grips with them if you wish to contribute
> to these ngs.
Some interesting - well, mildly - information confirming my diagnosis: I
have not thought of Graeber for many years, though I did come across a piece
of his in a society magazine called New Left Review recently.
I do, however, recall his confusion with the concept that a balance of
payments, er, balances, and his howler in believing that post-Keynesian
thought is a branch of neo-classical economics, but beyond that I know
nothing of him. But I did check out one claim of his today. He describes
himself as a professor at Yale; that turns out to be a rather elastic
definition, apparently. He is, in fact, an assistant professor, which is not
what most people would understand as a 'professor'. Many would regard
Graeber's claim as prima facie dishonest, but I would explain it instead as
confirmation of my impression that Graeber is merely intellectually insecure
and therefore susceptible to the temptation to burnish his resume, just as
the weaker candidates I interview professionally are liable to do (and they
always get caught out). I note that he has been an assistant professor for
some years, and I sympathise with the frustration that I infer he feels that
his career isn't going anywhere.
None of this, however, is central to Graeber's principal problem, which is
his apparent belief that being a teacher of anthropology fits him to be an
authority on politics and economics. I use an understatement to end all
understatements when I say it does not, and Graeber's own cerebrations on
these matters - see my remarks above - confirm the point with a rather
crashing obviousness.
Oliver Kamm
Correction: some of those protesting violently called themselves
pacifists, which is to say they were not pacifists in anything but
self-designation. They found that they were unable to attack people
and property without hindrance, however, and are now whingeing because
they found that Italian police are, to use a phrase of Orwell,
'tougher babies' than they're used to dealing with. Tough for them,
and plaudits go to the Italian police for protecting the people from
the mob.
Guilherme C Roschke
> > believe this, but for the record, vast amounts if not all of the beaten
> > and tortured were pacifists, of the sorts engaged in big, safe, and some
> > might even say boring marches. while quite a bit of the destruction came
> > from agent provacateurs.
>
> Correction: some of those protesting violently called themselves
> pacifists, which is to say they were not pacifists in anything but
> self-designation. They found that they were unable to attack people
> and property without hindrance, however, and are now whingeing because
> they found that Italian police are, to use a phrase of Orwell,
> 'tougher babies' than they're used to dealing with. Tough for them,
> and plaudits go to the Italian police for protecting the people from
> the mob.
just checking, we're both talking about the G-8 protests in genoa
and the bloody attack by the police upon the HQ of the organizers of the
non-confrontational marches right?
-gr
Dan Clore
> In article <40cd7d30.02120...@posting.google.com>,
> olive...@tiscali.co.uk (Oliver Kamm) wrote:
> > dgra...@rcn.net (David Graeber) wrote in message
> news:<dgraeber-011...@204-74-0-116.c3-0.nyw-ubr2.nyr-nyw.ny.cable.rcn.com>...
> > > Rich kid?
> >
> > Yup. A tenured Ivy League academic telling the Third World they
> > mustn't try to better themselves.
> >
> The man really does have no sense of embarrassment
> or shame - no matter how many times he's caught in a
> lie or fabrication, he just makes up a new one. After having
> made up the fact that I'm a rich kid (on the assumption
> that I probably am because I teach at Yale), and discovering
> that my parents were working class, he declares I'm
> a tenured Ivy League academic so that's the same thing.
> But once again in a desperate attempt to cover his own
> humiliation he simply humiliates himself again by inventing
> more facts which turn out to be untrue. No, actually, I'm not
> tenured. On what basis did he think I was? None. He just
> made it up. You see? He has absolutely no idea what he's talking
> about. And of course if he were to reply to this, he'd then say
> it doesn't matter because I still teach at Yale. But the fact remains
> he's fabricated two lies in a row, one to cover up the
> other, and shown us all how much we can believe anything
> he says.
Well, considering that Kamm apparently attributes your
childhood wealth not to your parents but to your job at
Yale, he probably figures that you've been teaching there
long enough to get tenure--since you were, what, three or
four maybe? Sounds like you were a bit of a child prodigy,
but perhaps your present ignorance can be attributed to
senility.
> Or does Kamm actually have a job? It's possible
> I am simply wrong to extrapolate from his silence
> but it's the only thing one can reasonably conclude
> given the evidence presented.
Well, he has been bragging about a job he once had--working
for his uncle.
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
All my fiction through 2001 and more. Intro by S.T. Joshi.
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
Lord Weÿrdgliffe and Necronomicon Page:
Josh Dougherty
cn.com...
(snip)
> The man really does have no sense of embarrassment
> or shame - no matter how many times he's caught in a
> lie or fabrication, he just makes up a new one. After having
> made up the fact that I'm a rich kid (on the assumption
> that I probably am because I teach at Yale), and discovering
> that my parents were working class, he declares I'm
> a tenured Ivy League academic so that's the same thing.
> But once again in a desperate attempt to cover his own
> humiliation he simply humiliates himself again by inventing
> more facts which turn out to be untrue. No, actually, I'm not
> tenured. On what basis did he think I was? None. He just
> made it up. You see? He has absolutely no idea what he's talking
> about. And of course if he were to reply to this, he'd then say
> it doesn't matter because I still teach at Yale.
You'd think so, but it turns out he's now saying that your position is not
*elite enough*. iow...it's now plainly obvious that he was just fabricating
arguments and lying (as if anyone's surprised), so he just does a complete
180 on everything he was saying. Just more proof.
(the horrible truth, in all its glory, respectfully snipped)
> Okay, enough of this. I am really writing this just
> to procrastinate - I'm supposed to be working on an
> essay on value theory for the journal of Fernand
> Braudel society, ironically enough - but since people
> were encouraging me to further Kamm's humiliation
> a bit a took some time off. Now I really do have to
> go. Been fun guys. And remember: Kamm has now admitted
> to supporting Nazism.
Great post David. You definitely have Kamm's number.
Josh
Oliver Kamm
Who is 'George Stiglitz'? Any relation to Joseph W. Bush?
Oliver Kamm
We're talking about the riots conducted by mobs at the G8 summit. I
tend to the suspicion that demonstrators armed with petrol bombs,
metal bars and sledgehammers were probably not best described as
non-confrontational, and I congratulate the Italian police for the
prompt and effective way in which they handled such people.
Oliver Kamm
I presumed from Graeber's description of himself as a professor that
he was indeed tenured, for I made the mistake of taking him at his
word. Only on inquiring more closely did I discover that he was not a
professor but only an assistant professor, but I cannot really be held
responsible for the rather revelaing combination of 'resume-inflation'
and snobbery that Graeber displays.
>
> > Or does Kamm actually have a job? It's possible
> > I am simply wrong to extrapolate from his silence
> > but it's the only thing one can reasonably conclude
> > given the evidence presented.
>
> Well, he has been bragging about a job he once had--working
> for his uncle.
Clore last with the facts as usual (shades of his belief, which he
conveniently never mentioned again on being asked to substantiate it,
that the IMF was responsible for the Argentine currency peg). I have
never had a 'job' with my uncle, nor any other politician, and have
never said otherwise. I served him as political adviser in an entirely
voluntary and spare-time capacity, much as I am serving as Graeber's
adviser on remedial studies in political economy - except that my
prior charge was rather better-educated on the subject.
Oliver Kamm
To be precise, Graeber offered the unsolicited opinion (for the
question was not directed to him) that an innumerate howler - viz that
the US was a net exporter of capital with which to exploit the Third
World, simultaneously with running a current account deficit - was an
entirely appropriate comment. Imagine a participant in an ng devoted
to mathematics being asked if a submission stating '2+2=5' was
appropriate material, and you get the scale of the problem. Graeber
accompanied his howler with a denunciation of post-Keynesianism as
'neoclassical economics', a definition that will be a surprise to
many. Perhaps 'George Stiglitz', whoever he may be, could put him
right on this.
>
>
> >
> >
> > >
> > > Rich kid?
> >
> > Yup. A tenured Ivy League academic telling the Third World they
> > mustn't try to better themselves.
> >
> The man really does have no sense of embarrassment
> or shame - no matter how many times he's caught in a
> lie or fabrication, he just makes up a new one. After having
> made up the fact that I'm a rich kid (on the assumption
> that I probably am because I teach at Yale), and discovering
> that my parents were working class, he declares I'm
> a tenured Ivy League academic so that's the same thing.
> But once again in a desperate attempt to cover his own
> humiliation he simply humiliates himself again by inventing
> more facts which turn out to be untrue. No, actually, I'm not
> tenured. On what basis did he think I was? None. He just
> made it up. You see? He has absolutely no idea what he's talking
> about. And of course if he were to reply to this, he'd then say
> it doesn't matter because I still teach at Yale. But the fact remains
> he's fabricated two lies in a row, one to cover up the
> other, and shown us all how much we can believe anything
> he says.
>
>
I confess I was misled by Graeber's description of himself as a
professor, which I assumed would be a tenured position. I realise now
that Graeber chose to exhibit the tendency known as resume-inflation,
for he is more junior than he claimed.
>
> >
> > The fascist-sympathizing troll is now reduced
> > > to simply making things up. Actually my father was a
> > > plate-stripper and my mother a seamstress but what this
> > > has to do with anything is beyond me. Just a desperate
> > > attempt to come up with some smear or personal slur to
> > > throw out by someone caught with his pro-Nazi
> > > pants down.
> >
> > Just a point of factual information.
>
> No, actually it's a libel, since you made it
> up to try to assassinate someone's character and
> it turns out not to be true.
>
No, it's a statement of fact: Graeber enjoys life on a university
campus while having plenty of opportunity to take foreign holidays as
far afield as Genoa, while the Third World gets on with lifting itself
out of poverty by ignoring the anti-globalisation rioters' advice.
Graeber is most indignant that I won't credit his impeccably objective
account of who started a riot. Note that he doesn't cite a single
source for his allegations other than fellow rioters (oh, and Italian
parliamentarians, from the Communist Refoundation party - admirers of
Stalin). Presumably the police planted the sledgehammers and Molotov
cocktails, just as the government is covering up a crashed UFO at
Roswell and Queen Elizabeth is an international drugrunner.
Alternatively, perhaps Graeber should just quit whingeing because he
wasn't treated with the deference due to a gentleman of his position.
I confess I made a mistake in believing you when you said you were a
professor at Yale, but it would have helped me come to an informed
judgement if you'd been a little more open about your junior status.
Graeber is at least right on one point: I have no intention of
introducing to these ngs my academic and professional background,
which is of no relevance to these discussions. Graeber's evident
belief to the contrary is an instance of sheer, crashing snobbery.
> A final note - I really have better things to
> do with my time
Could have fooled me.
but it's so much fun watching Kamm
> flail about humiliating himself, digging himself
> deeper and deeper... - so, note how hilarious it
> is to see Kamm accusing me, a poor kid who managed
> to work himself into a decent job, with being an
> elitist. His entire act is based on presumed elitism.
> His entire philosophy is elitist. After all, the
> movement he slanders as being dedicated to undermining
> the economic prospects for poor people in the global
> south actually _began_ in the global south, and insofar
> as it is actually about people in the north intervening
> on their behalf (this is a minor element, really)
> those people are simply conveying the positions held
> by those organizations which actually represent poor
> people in the global south.
Here we go: Graeber the elitist exposed. Who *are* the organisations
'representing' the people? He doesn't say, because such groups as he
elects to 'represent' the poor have never been voted on by the poor
themselves. They are merely the appointees of affluent westerners who
tell the Third World what's good for it.
Those who are genuinely elected by the poor (recall the Mexican
President's caustic words about globaphobes after the Seattle riots,
Graeber? Thought not: because he after all has democratic legitimacy
and you don't) strongly oppose the programme of the anti-Third
Worlders rioting in Genoa. Ever heard of the CUTS centre for
International Trade, Economics and the Environment based at Jaipur?
Thought not: it's a scholarly body of Third World intellectuals and
policy advisers. Here's the view of one of its leading (Indian)
members about the anti-globalisers' campaign to disrupt free trade
agreements with commitments to labour standards and the environment:
"Developing country academics and civil society are overwhelmingly
against it. Evidence of this can be found in the TWIN-SAL statement of
1999. In the run up to the Seattle meeting, 103 people from all over
the world signed on to the Third World Intellectuals and NGOs
Statement Against Linkage. Two years on, experience has only fortified
their arguments."
Incidentally, the term 'global south' suggests Graeber needs to brush
up on his geography too. How about a five-quadrant diagram to show the
concept?
You do not see any
> organizations of poor people in the global south
> actually _supporting_ IMF policies.
Graeber might not see them, but then his argument that because he's
never heard of X then X cannot exist is the epitome of crass ignorance
and elitism. Of course you see them; they’re a bulwark against
corrupt rulers mismanaging the economy.
So what does
> Kamm's position come down to? "I am a highly trained economist
> (except of course, I'm not really a highly trained economist)
> and therefore I know better what is good for these
> poor people than they do. Poor people are stupid
> and do not know what's good for them. They should
> shut up and let members of the elite of highly trained
> economists such as myself (except of course I'm not
> really a highly trained economist) make all decisions for
> them. Under no conditions should the majority of poor
> people have any say in public policy because they are
> too stupid.
Those who have read this far will have a pretty good idea of who is
too stupid to have any say in public policy, and it is not the Third
World.
Democracy, for instance, in which the
> majority elect a government which then carries out
> the economic policies that majority prefers must not
> occur. This makes his defense of Berlusconi as the
> people's choice particularly hilarious, since Kamm
> is openly opposed to democracy elsewhere, at least
> insofar as it involves economic policy, which must be
> left to the trained elite such as himself (except,
> of course, he is not really a member of that
> trained elite at all). Kamm has even gone so far as
> to say that debt relief for desperately poor countries
> would be 'bad for the poor' because it would mean
> IMF economists would no longer would have so much ability
> to tell their governments how to run their economies -
> ie, it might allow the poor to have some say in
> economic policy (if only through elected representatives)
> and since the poor are stupid and could not possibly
> know what's good for them, that in itself would be bad for
> the poor.
>
> Kamm incidentally knows nothing of my own positions;
> the issue I've mainly emphasized in my own writings
> is about immigration:
Let us hope it's nothing to do with economics, then, because you're
certainly out of your depth on the matter.
that is, if we were serious
> about globalization, we should lift border restrictions
> and allow people to live anywhere they want.
I agree.
If
> this is anti-poor, as Kamm has asserted my positions
> are, this would have to mean that Kamm believes that
> it is for the benefit of poor people in Bangladesh
> or Uganda that we do not allow them to move to
> Europe or the U.S., and that it would hurt them
> terribly to give them this freedom. Once again, the
> poor must be too stupid to know what's good for them.
> But Kamm knows, being a brilliant economist (except of
> course he's not really a brilliant economist, or
> apparently, an economist at all). I might note that mine
> is hardly an isolated position: the need to open borders
> was the main theme of the Genoa protests as well.
So that's what you call Molotov cocktails.
> Apparently we are all destroying economic opportunities
> for the poor by suggesting they should have free choice
> in where they want to live.
>
> I should probably also point out I don't myself
> subscribe to Kamm's elitism - I know that it's
> perfectly possible for someone who loves knowledge
> to teach themselves a discipline, even outside
> academia, and learn it just as well or better than
> academics. I am just pointing out the complete
> incoherence of his own positions.
Graeber here realises what he's said and tries to back out of it. But
elitism is a rather obvious, and not a pretty, stance.
For instance, he
> will insist that anyone with the slightest knowledge
> of economics would know that position A is laughable,
> insane, etc etc. Then if you look into the matter
> you will almost invariably find that there are in
> fact economists - real economists, with actual
> economic training, who unlike Kamm had to pass
> difficult exams and have research papers graded by
> other trained economists, who had to publish in peer-
> reviewed journals, whose work has (unike Kamm's
> ravings) had to pass judgment by scholars who know the
> field backwards and forwards and have the power
> to flunk or censure you if you lie or make up data - who come
> to exactly the opposite conclusions. Economists are
> hardly a uniform lot. While there are many economists
> who avidly support IMF or World Bank positions -
> not surprising, considering so many economists are
> employed by the IMF or institutions with similar
> interests and philosophies - there are plenty of
> real economists who avidly oppose them. And many who
> have gone from one side to the other. Take the
> example of George Stiglitz,
WHO? Do you mean Joseph Stiglitz, you who are so obviously familiar
with his work?
who used to be the chief
> economist for the World Bank - a man who rose to
> the very top of the economic field, where Kamm's
> position (with apparently no academic qualifications,
> no publications, no intellectual recognition, reduced
> to writing only for public forums with no academic
> standards and lying his head off on those) seems
> to define the very nadir. But he quit the World Bank
> in disgust and has since spent his time demonstrating
> the extreme economic destructiveness of structural
> adjustment policies. Now, if I were to post a few
> of Stiglitz' positions to the list (just the positions,
> without mentioning the source) Kamm would instantly
> appear to declare how embarrassingly ignorant they were
> are of even the basics of economic theory, how no one
> who knew anything about the subject would possibly
> see them as anything but pathetic and ignorant. That's all
> he ever does.
No, that's all I ever do to *Graeber*, for the embarrassingly obvious
reason that his postings display no economic knowledge whatever.
Economists distinguish between positive economics (what is) and
normative economics (what ought to be). There are indeed innumerable
views on normative economics - it's not the point of the discipline to
come up with policy views. All economics can do is test for
consistency. The view that a country can run a current account deficit
while being a net exporter of capital is the type of thing that
economists catch, though Graeber can't.
But that's why he's too much of a coward
> to appear on any forum where intellectual standards
> are actually enforced - in a real debate, in a real
> scholarly forum, before real trained economists, someone
> like Stiglitz - a _real_ economist, with real training
> and accomplishments - would rip a fraud like Kamm to
> shreds in 30 seconds.
Stiglitz is indeed a brilliant economist, whose theoretical work on
the economics of information deservedly won him a Nobel Prize, and who
could rip me to shreds. But the obvious ought not to need stating
except for Graeber: Stiglitz's erudition does not make his policy
views right, and his policy views do not make Graeber's economic
illiteracy any less extreme merely because Graeber fancies he agrees
with them (as I very much doubt he does: Stiglitz's point about what
he castigates as the destructive policies of the IMF is that it
dissipates support for free trade).
>
> Okay, enough of this. I am really writing this just
> to procrastinate - I'm supposed to be working on an
> essay on value theory for the journal of Fernand
> Braudel society, ironically enough - but since people
> were encouraging me to further Kamm's humiliation
> a bit a took some time off. Now I really do have to
> go. Been fun guys. And remember: Kamm has now admitted
> to supporting Nazism.
> DG
Please, whatever you do, don't forget to post more of this stuff.
Oliver Kamm
[large volume of incoherent abuse snipped]
Kamm has even gone so far as
> to say that debt relief for desperately poor countries
> would be 'bad for the poor' because it would mean
> IMF economists would no longer would have so much ability
> to tell their governments how to run their economies -
> ie, it might allow the poor to have some say in
> economic policy (if only through elected representatives)
> and since the poor are stupid and could not possibly
> know what's good for them, that in itself would be bad for
> the poor.
Omitted to mention this point, when I had meant to, for it is a nice
indication of how far out of his depth Graeber is when he attempts a
comment on political economy. I challenge him to produce a single
statement from me when I have ever said debt relief for poor countries
would be bad for the poor because IMF economists would be unable to to
tell governments how to run their economies. He will not be able to,
of course, but what is revealing about his remark is the depth of
economic illiteracy it displays. I am strongly in favour of debt
relief and debt management programmes - indeed at an earlier stage in
my career I worked on precisely such proposals. I am opposed to
unconditional debt forgiveness, however, for a reason perfectly
well-grounded in financial economics: it would increase developing
countries' cost of capital. Because developing countries would thereby
find it *harder* to gain the funds necessary for development, they
would certainly be *more* reliant on the IMF and not less.
I repeat, for Graeber's benefit: you complain of being termed ignorant
(not that I recall my applying such a term to you, but I am happy to
advance it), but this is simply a statement of fact. You are not
competent in the subject you are writing about. I cannot fathom the
snobbery involved in supposing that you are immune from the
conventional requirement of study and research in order to be able to
contribute knowledgeably about a difficult and technical discipline,
but I point it out to you nonetheless.
James A. Donald
On Mon, 2 Dec 2002 18:56:29 -0500, Guilherme C Roschke
<gros...@luminousvoid.net> wrote:
> just checking, we're both talking about the G-8 protests in
> genoa and the bloody attack by the police upon the HQ of the
> organizers of the non-confrontational marches right?
You could argue that the marchers were fighting on the side of
right and justice, but to argue that they were pacifists is a
bit silly.
During the riots the police were attacked by armed organized
groups, many of them wearing clothes that looked suspiciously
like a uniform. In response the police struck hard at the
headquarters, to be greeted by a loud complaint that they were
attacking anarchist pacifists.
The black bloc uniform is almost as funny as pacifists with
molotov cocktails. One can imagine anarchists wearing
uniforms, several different uniforms, but when there is only
one uniform, the claim to be anarchists is as doubtful as the
claim to be pacifists.
The rationale for the uniform is that it provides anonymity.
When one guy in uniform throws a molotov cocktail, the police
supposedly will not know who to arrest. Of course, the police
do know who to arrest. They arrest everyone in uniform in the
vicinity of the crime. The legal system has lots of methods
for dealing with groups of people acting in unity to pursue a
common purpose.
It seems to me that the real function of the uniform is to
provide a sense of identity, unity and cohesion, much like the
blackshirt uniform.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
dMGeNOfZ5x13MA1Liq71nPpY2RkuorF03NqBLFyc
40++FBjmoPpmPI0163ocbz9Tf8db6hBGXUQQtJ0ty
M J Carley
>During the riots the police were attacked by armed organized groups,
>many of them wearing clothes that looked suspiciously like a uniform.
>In response the police struck hard at the headquarters, to be greeted
>by a loud complaint that they were attacking anarchist pacifists.
The police were attacked by people dressed in black: there is good
photographic evidence that those people were colluding with the
police. The police, in response, did not attack those dressed in black
but peaceful demonstrators, including many who were nowhere near any
fighting. For example:
http://www.diario.it/cnt/speciali/genova/copertinaG8.htm
http://www.diario.it/cnt/speciali/genova/QuestoNumero.htm
shows a photo of a fifty year old woman helping a badly beaten
man. The woman, a nurse, had worked as a nurse in Africa for many
years before returning to Italy to work in a hospital in Trieste. She
went to the demonstrations with the Lilliput network. Her photo
appeared in the `Il Piccolo' newspaper in Trieste. Because of this, as
she passed in front of the forces of order with her hands raised, she
was brutally beaten.
But it's good to know you oppose the force of the state being used
against unarmed and innocent people.
--
`Al vero filosofo ogni terreno e' patria.'
BHaLC #6
No MS attachments: http://www.fsf.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html
Home page: http://staff.bath.ac.uk/ensmjc/
brian turner
statement about anti-globalization protests (he might be unaware of
Mussolini sympathizers involement, you might be overstating
it--regardless, there is no obvious endorsement of such
activitites--that could only come through additional questioning,
instead, you stop and leap). This is exactly the kind of thing hurled
at Chomsky re: the Khmer Rouge and Faurisson. No one asks, "Noam,
what did you mean when you said X about the Khmer Rouge..are you
saying you endorse everything they were doing?", they just say
"Chomsky supports Pol Pot". I'd suggest it's wrong then, it's wrong
when you do it.
And the attacks on Oliver Kamm because he (so you say) *only* read
some books on economics, has a general implication beyond your war of
words with him that bothered me. So only those with formal
credentials can comment on economics? No self education through
reading is possible?
dgra...@rcn.net (David Graeber) wrote in message news:<dgraeber-021...@204-74-0-116.c3-0.nyw-ubr2.nyr-nyw.ny.cable.rcn.com>...
Padraig L Henry
wrote:
>
Excellent post, David.
I would sincerely doubt that Kamm is being paid to write his
chronically deluded, reactionary scribblings, though I'm certain that
such a failed "political analyst" would like to imagine otherwise,
given that his opera-singing new Dutch wife pays all the bills. Fine
in opera-loving-working-class Italy, but in Britain it highlights his
true colours, a right-wing, unreconstructed, pompous imperialist
cluelessly masquerading as a left-wing democrat. The most brutal kind
of loutishly pedantic Snob. Every newsgroup, these days, has at least
one of them ... and we're all the poorer for it.
Sad. But not even as sad as Italian film-maker and former doyen of the
Italian Left, 50-year-old Roberto Benigni's recent embrace of the
ideology of Silvio Berlusconi (whose company, Medus, released
Benigni's latest breaking-all-Italian-box-office-records film, his
risible Pinocchio) and his bulldog market values.
And I don't think, either, that there will be any Blue Fairy on the
ideological horizon any time soon to redeem the exponential growth of
Kamm's woodworm-ridden proboscis ...
Padraig
Padraig L Henry
brian turner
>... I am opposed to
> unconditional debt forgiveness, however, for a reason perfectly
> well-grounded in financial economics: it would increase developing
> countries' cost of capital. Because developing countries would thereby
> find it *harder* to gain the funds necessary for development... [deleted]
I'll yield to your expertise that the cost of capital would go up.
But what kind of system would produce such a result? That immediately
strikes me as a question. Banks, likely perceiving implied
socialization of risk (i.e. bailout ready if needed), thus given
beyond market impetus to lend -- lend tons of money to gangster
dictators and corrupt oligarchies (the kind you admirably rail
against, albeit while avoiding the issue of US admiration or even
complicity, in the cases where this existed). Dictators/oligarchs
manage to spend the money in ways not benefiting the majority of the
population (possibly not even those paying the tax bill). Dictators
fade into the history books, and the tax paying public is told they
must now pay the recklessly lended to debts of dictators and
oligarchs, or else their cost of capital will increase. Who exactly
is getting the market disciple signals? The population? The ones
that didn't borrow in the first place, or benefit from the borrowing?
If the cost of capital goes up, this perhaps shows a market failure,
requiring intervention.
Now, this is surely an exaggeration. Surely there are some cases
where the borrowing gov'ts were at least partly legitimate, and
borrowed funds did at least partly benefit the population. For those
cases, you have a point, though I'd still say forgive it if there is
ability-to-pay problems. If COC goes up subsequently, the rich
countries can subsidize it back to previous market levels.
David Graeber
bk...@hotmail.com (brian turner) wrote:
> Your "Oliver Kamm is a Nazi sympahtizer" is a pretty far leap from a
> statement about anti-globalization protests (he might be unaware of
> Mussolini sympathizers involement, you might be overstating
> it--regardless, there is no obvious endorsement of such
> activitites--that could only come through additional questioning,
> instead, you stop and leap). This is exactly the kind of thing hurled
> at Chomsky re: the Khmer Rouge and Faurisson. No one asks, "Noam,
> what did you mean when you said X about the Khmer Rouge..are you
> saying you endorse everything they were doing?", they just say
> "Chomsky supports Pol Pot". I'd suggest it's wrong then, it's wrong
> when you do it.
I described quite explicitly what happened: that an
overtly fascist element in Berlusconi's coalition directed
the police preparations, that these involved alliance
with fascist and nazi elements who acted as provacateurs
(all of this later documented in the Italian press), that
attacks were leveled against explicitly pacifist groups
like Lilliput or feminist groups doing spiral dances, etc,
that Italian parlaimentary investigators found that arrestees
were systematically tortured, that fascist elements in
the Italian police made prisoners chant fascist slogans
and sing fascist songs while beating them, etc etc. IN
RESPONSE TO THAT Kamm replied "Go Italian police!" On
being told that police tortured prisoners and went
about systematically breaking the bones and shattering
teeth of helpless sleeping activists, he did not reply
"I don't believe that really happened", he replied that he
thought that they were entirely justified and approved of their
actions. After being told that police were torturing
prisoners under pictures of Mussolini, he says that
the prisoners got what they deserved. Go check the posts.
Now, when you say this resembles the way people slur
Chomsky, well, I did indeed originally want to point
out that irony, since Kamm has made a career out of
doing this to others: not only claiming Chomsky supports
Nazis and Pol Pot but finding ways to make a similar
charge against anyone who disagrees with him, so as to
generally smear people and disrupt the newsgroup. I
thought it would be useful to point out how easily the
same could be done to him. What I was amazed to discover
however was that Kamm actually _does_ support such actions.
So far he has never at any point, even when repeatedly
challenged, made _any_ remark distancing himself in any way
from any action the fascists have made, or from the fascists
themselves, or stated his disapproval of any aspect
of their activities, or even made comments like "if it
turned out they really had done X or Y or Z I would
hardly approve of it" - but made numerous, aggressive,
and repeated remarks strongly supporting acts of brutality
on their part.
Chomsky when challenged is always perfectly willing
to tell people what nonsense these charges are, how
much he hates Nazis, brutal regimes like Pol Pot's,
etc. He certainly does not go around saying that Pol
Pot's victims were a bunch of counterrevolutionary
thugs who got what they deserved. Kamm, who nontheless
insists Chomsky's disavowals are not good enough, and that
his denials are disingenuous, refuses to even make such
denials himself; he does not distance himself from the
fascists in any way and instead villifies their victims and
says the fascists were justified to beat and torture them.
So what else am I supposed to conclude?
>
> And the attacks on Oliver Kamm because he (so you say) *only* read
> some books on economics, has a general implication beyond your war of
> words with him that bothered me. So only those with formal
> credentials can comment on economics? No self education through
> reading is possible?
Of course it's possible.
No one is saying Kamm can't comment on economics. What
we are challenging is Kamm's insistence that (a) he is an
expert on economics, and (b) no one who is not an expert
on economics such as himself has the right to comment on
anything. His entire internet career is based on sneering
contemptuously at anyone who disagrees with him, saying
that he is a scholar, a scientist, an expert in economics
and they are obviously a ignorant illiterate fool whose
opinions are worthless. If so, it seems reasonable for
those who are the objects of his endless sneering and
verbal abuse to ask the self-proclaimed expert why they
should believe he really is an expert to begin with.
To ask him to produce some evidence. A degree. A publication.
Some work he is done which has been examined by other scholars
in the field and not found wanting. Something to back up
his endless claims of intellectual superiority.
In response he has managed to produce nothing - no
evidence that he actually is an expert on economics of
any kind. It is hard to escape the conclusion
that the man is simply a fraud.
DG
Oliver Kamm
I don't disagree at all that there should be intervention to
ameliorate the debt crisis. My point was that straighforward debt
forgiveness would have the unwanted consequence of raising developing
countries' cost of capital, because private lenders extending fresh
funds would then demand an additional premium to compensate them for
the risk of future forgiveness. That premium would be paid not by
western banks or western taxpayers, but by developing countries
looking for capital to fund their current account deficits as they try
to grow. These may not be the very poorest countries, which generally
don't borrow in the capital markets, but they would be poor countries
nonetheless, and it is imperative that schemes for debt relief end up
being paid for by the right people and not the wrong people. The
schemes of the 'Drop the Debt' campaign would end up being paid for by
exactly the wrong people, namely developing countries.
I certainly sympathise with your point that the people of debtor
nations should not be held responsible for the profligacy of past
despots (we can all think of names of former African dictators). That
is precisely what I am thinking of when I urge debt relief schemes
that don't end up making Third World countries poorer and don't
encourage the 'moral hazard' whereby countries that build up a record
of creditworthiness suddenly find, through debt forgiveness for
countries that have been ransacked by a domestic dictator, that their
cost of capital rises through no fault of their own. The task ought to
be to do exactly as succesive British governments have done (starting
with the Conservative Chancellor Nigel Lawson in the 1980s) and James
Baker did in the 1980s, and adopt a 'menu' approach to new lending and
voluntary debt reduction. This menu included in the 1980s, when I
worked on the subject, bonds convertible into local equity, exit bonds
with long maturities that banks could accept in exchange for their
loan claims, and debt-equity swaps. Jeffrey Sachs of Harvard also
pioneered a technique of debt buybacks, whereby the debtor country
bought back its debt when a bank's claim was trading at a deep
discount to the market. I am strongly in favour of western aid to
enable debtor countries to take such imaginative steps in reducing
their debt burden, because in these ways the debt relief would not
have the negative eternality of raising the cost of capital for other
debtor nations.
This is slightly technical a discussion in nature, but I'm trying to
make the distinction between unconditional debt forgiveness, which
would do immense damage to Third World living standards, and debt
relief whereby western countries enable debtor nations to reduce their
own debt by means that do *not* make it more difficult to attarct
fresh funds in future. The corollary of course is that that relief has
to be conditional on the debtor nations' taking steps in economic
management that make it more difficult for future profligacy to take
place (e.g. pursuit of effective monetary and fiscal policies and
control of deficits). This is why, while there are reasonable
arguments to be had about how far conditionality should be imposed,
the much-maligned IMF has a crucial role to play in getting countries
out of poverty.
Oliver Kamm
Graeber's bluff has of course been called, and it's unsurprising he
can only bluster in response. I have no particular inclination to
waste time on a man who's already dug his own grave, but suffice to
say that his complaint is that I do not regard him, or the Stalinists
he cites as corroborative evidence, as a reliable source of
information (note the phraseology: "I described quite explicitly what
happened", as if he were a definitive source). This is quite right: I
don't, and for reasons that Graeber has demonstrated in this thread
when caught out fibbing about his own resume. Suffice to say , also,
that I do not sneer at 'anyone who disagrees with me': I sneer at
*him*, for imagining he can get away with making confident
declarations on technical subjects without having first taken the
trouble to conduct some elementary research on those subjects. This
tendency reached a comic stage when he cited in his support Joseph
Stiglitz without having so much as checked the man's name, let alone
his arguments. Given such a record, I'm unsurprised Graeber should be
so touchy, but facts have a tendency to expose the fraudulent and the
poseur, don't they, old bean?
Oliver Kamm
>
> Excellent post, David.
>
> I would sincerely doubt that Kamm is being paid to write his
> chronically deluded, reactionary scribblings, though I'm certain that
> such a failed "political analyst" would like to imagine otherwise,
> given that his opera-singing new Dutch wife pays all the bills. Fine
> in opera-loving-working-class Italy, but in Britain it highlights his
> true colours, a right-wing, unreconstructed, pompous imperialist
> cluelessly masquerading as a left-wing democrat. The most brutal kind
> of loutishly pedantic Snob. Every newsgroup, these days, has at least
> one of them ... and we're all the poorer for it.
[snip]
I'm certainly interested that devotees of 'arguably the most important
intellectual alive' learn that an opponent's arguments may be
dismissed if he is British and likes opera, as it confirms my
judgement of the analytical rigour underlying the Chomsky cult. The
obvious ought not to need stating, but it clearly does in this case:
aesthetic criteria are independent of political ones; you can no more
draw inferences about someone's politics from his aesthetic judgements
than you can infer a novelist' opinions from those of his of his
characters. This is an absolutely basic principle of artistic
criticism, and it is thus unsurprising that a member of the Chomsky
cult should be unaware of it. Note also the elitism and snobbery
underyling the sentiment quoted: opera is not appropriate for the
British working class, who are evidently in this poster's view too
unrefined and stupid to appreciate it. Again, we find the seeds of
this type of approach in Chomsky's work proclaiming that the
electorate are too stupid to read the news without his critical
guidance, but I confess that the extremism of this type of elitism is
displayed to a fuller glory still in the post I have quoted.
Guilherme C Roschke
> > and the bloody attack by the police upon the HQ of the organizers of the
> > non-confrontational marches right?
> >
> > -gr
>
> We're talking about the riots conducted by mobs at the G8 summit. I
> tend to the suspicion that demonstrators armed with petrol bombs,
> metal bars and sledgehammers were probably not best described as
> non-confrontational, and I congratulate the Italian police for the
> prompt and effective way in which they handled such people.
so we're not talking about the attack on the HQ then. we're
talkign about the parts where the police stood back and allowed nefarious
and perhaps infiltrated groups to attack property. but then charged in
and attacked once these groups entered the larger non-confrontational
crowds. did you see the pics on intalian indymedia of cops dressed as
anarchists?
-gr
Guilherme C Roschke
> against unarmed and innocent people.
james is pretty good at that. hang around for a while and you'll
hear his "but the opposition was beating up dissenters" argument for (or
maybe against) pinochet.
-gr
Guilherme C Roschke
> > genoa and the bloody attack by the police upon the HQ of the
> > organizers of the non-confrontational marches right?
>
> You could argue that the marchers were fighting on the side of
> right and justice, but to argue that they were pacifists is a
> bit silly.
>
> During the riots the police were attacked by armed organized
> groups, many of them wearing clothes that looked suspiciously
> like a uniform. In response the police struck hard at the
> headquarters, to be greeted by a loud complaint that they were
> attacking anarchist pacifists.
>
organizers, rather than any concentration of violent troublemakers
-gr
Guilherme C Roschke
> ameliorate the debt crisis. My point was that straighforward debt
> forgiveness would have the unwanted consequence of raising developing
> countries' cost of capital, because private lenders extending fresh
> funds would then demand an additional premium to compensate them for
> the risk of future forgiveness. That premium would be paid not by
> western banks or western taxpayers, but by developing countries
> looking for capital to fund their current account deficits as they try
> to grow.
thats assuming that these risks haven't been weighed in already
right?
-gr
Guilherme C Roschke
> poseur, don't they, old bean?
kamm, this has to rank amongst your better.
-gr
David Graeber
Guilherme C Roschke <gros...@luminousvoid.net> wrote:
Except of course very few of the people at the Social
Forum were anarchists, and all of them had signed a pledge
of non-violence which most anarchists refused to sign.
I should note in passing that the raid was not really on
the Genoa Social Forum "HQ" at all - it was on the Independent
Media Center, which occupied four stories of a school
building the city had provided for their use; the GSF
had a suite of offices on one floor, but the police raid
was against the entire IMC, and a "safe space" for
people to sleep and eat in across the street, where
they really smashed people up; in the IMC they were prevented
by the presence of a European Parlaiment minister ("when
she held out that card," an Irish filmmaker who was there
told me, "it was like holding out a cross to vampires.")
Nonetheless they went through the entire IMC and systematically
destroyed every bit of film or videocassette they came
across, along with smashing several computers that seemed
to have video material uploaded to it - the reason,
according to the universal opinion of the media people
who were in there at the time, was that they were aware
we had tapes of the phoney Black Bloc going in and out
of police stations and were desperate to destroy it
before it was released to the mainstream media. (They
failed. A CD containing the footage was smuggled out
over the next couple days and then wired back into
Italy where it appeared on those TV news shows not
owned by Berlusconi. They were not "striking back" at
some violent fringe; they were there to destroy the
evidence which showed that the violent fringe was
actually composed of cops - or their fascist allies.
The location of the hardcore anarchist camps was no
secret, the police could have raided them but chose
to concentrate on the pacifists instead. Donald's version of
events is as usual a peculiar fantasy - cops attacked by armed
paramilitaries? As far as I know even the cops didn't claim
that! But as usual the self-proclaimed "anarchist" comes up
with a bizarre, fantastic version of events which casts the
forces of state repression in a better light even than they
did themselves.
I was actually present during these events and can
give eye-witness accounts of a lot of it - I wasn't
there during the IMC raid but was there right after it, saw
the phoney police Black Bloc on several occasions (they
were so obvious - everyone knew who they were), was
about a block or two away when Guiliani was killed. So
if people want to know any specifics, I'd be happy to
fill people in.
DG
Joaquin67
<Pine.GSO.4.44.02120...@unagi.cis.upenn.edu>,
Guilherme C Roschke <gros...@luminousvoid.net> wrote:
[snip]
>did you see the pics on intalian indymedia of cops dressed as
>anarchists?
>
>-gr
this isn't that uncommon of an occurence either. i saw them
pretending to be anarchists at the imf/wb meeting back in
september.
http://students.uwsp.edu/mgris376/discontent/ubb/copbloc.html
it was funny because i saw them on saturday the 28th (which was
the big, diverse group protest/listen to a bunch of
speakers/march in an orderly fashion thing) where there wasn't
even a call for a black bloc. the anarchists that were there
were just there as an anarchist noise bloc, though our numbers
were severely reduced thanks to the police actions on friday the
27th. i doubt that they had people undercover that day because
apparently you don't need the pretext of "violent rioting" to
arrest anarchists (and journalists and interested by-standers,
etc.). jay-walking and being in a park are good enough reasons.
matt
Oliver Kamm
Thanks; I certainly thought it was pertinent.
Oliver Kamm
No; the interest rate that a sovereign borrower pays reflects the
price the market allocates to the risk of default, among other
variables. The fact that sovereign new debt issues for emerging
markets typically carry coupons of anything between 1% and 5% more per
year than US government or corporate debt is attributable to that risk
among others: in order to be compensated for bearing that risk (i.e.
that he won't get his money back) and thus extending the funds, the
lender requires a so-called risk premium above the usual proxy for a
risk-free return, viz. the yield on US Treasuries.
My point is that with good economic management (e.g. avoiding the type
of problem with profligate tyrants that Mr Turner referred to) a
developing country can reduce that coupon spread and thus reduce its
cost of capital. If there were unconditional and general forgiveness
of outstanding debts, as advocated by the Drop the Debt campaign, the
consequence would be that such a process would go into reverse,
because a creditworthy borrower would now have no incentive to
exercise good economic management: quite the reverse, it would have an
incentive to blow its national reserves in the style of an Idi Amin,
confident that if things got *really* bad then the west would just
forgive its debts again ... and again ... and so on, while the poor
suffered from the misallocation of resources, plunging exchange rate,
inflation (and so reduction in real incomes) and so on. This would be
the predictable consequence of debt forgiveness granted without
conditions: developing countries' cost of capital would rise sharply,
thereby making it more difficult for them to lift themselves out of
poverty. This is not to say that we abjure intervention, on which
point I agree with Mr Turner; the task is, however, to ease the debt
burden while ensuring that developing countries don't see a rise in
their cost of capital and don't have a perverse incentive to mismanage
their economies.
I should add that since the Latin American debt crisis broke 20 years
ago, both the US and the UK, under successive governments, have had a
good record of pursuing precisely such ends. The US was responsible
for the so-called Brady Plan (named after Nicholas Brady, US Treasury
Secretary) under which banks were offered three options with regard to
sovereign debt: reduce (that is, forgive) a part of it, cut interest
rates on the existing debt, or provide new loans, backed by $30
billion in loans by the IMF and World Bank. That is the type of scheme
that can have a practical effect in improving the economic prospects
of the developing countries; the proposals of the anti-globalisers
would, of course, have the opposite effect, by making it more
difficult for developing countries to secure the funds necessary for
their investment needs.
Oliver Kamm
>
> [large volume of incoherent abuse snipped]
>
> Kamm has even gone so far as
> > to say that debt relief for desperately poor countries
> > would be 'bad for the poor' because it would mean
> > IMF economists would no longer would have so much ability
> > to tell their governments how to run their economies -
> > ie, it might allow the poor to have some say in
> > economic policy (if only through elected representatives)
> > and since the poor are stupid and could not possibly
> > know what's good for them, that in itself would be bad for
> > the poor.
>
> Omitted to mention this point, when I had meant to, for it is a nice
> indication of how far out of his depth Graeber is when he attempts a
> comment on political economy. I challenge him to produce a single
> statement from me when I have ever said debt relief for poor countries
> would be bad for the poor because IMF economists would be unable to to
> tell governments how to run their economies.
It will not have escaped the ng's attention that Graeber has failed to
respond to this challenge, for reasons we can only guess at. Perhaps
in future he will be a little more circumspect when making didactic
assertions on subjects where he lacks training or even rudimentary
competence.
Dan Clore
But, but, but David, the fact that you were there and saw
this stuff *proves* that you are an Evil Lying Leftist
Anarchist Stalinist Pinko Commie Liar who lies and lies and
lies and never tells the truth, who even lies when he tells
the truth....
--
Dan Clore
Now available: _The Unspeakable and Others_
All my fiction through 2001 and more. Intro by S.T. Joshi.
http://www.wildsidepress.com/index2.htm
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1587154838/thedanclorenecro
Lord Weÿrdgliffe and Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
News for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo
Said Smygo, the iconoclast of Zothique: "Bear a hammer with
thee always, and break down any terminus on which is
written: 'So far shalt thou pass, but no further go.'"
--Clark Ashton Smith
Constantinople
<cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote:
>
>But, but, but David, the fact that you were there and saw
>this stuff *proves* that you are an Evil Lying Leftist
>Anarchist Stalinist Pinko Commie Liar who lies and lies and
>lies and never tells the truth, who even lies when he tells
>the truth....
Anyone who has dealt with Graeber before already has plenty of
independent reason to consider him a compulsive liar, among other
things.
David Graeber
<cl...@columbia-center.org> wrote:
But wait, doesn't that mean if I say I was there,
and it's true, then it isn't true and I wasn't there
because I'm necessarily a liar? Oh dear! Now I don't
know what to think, even about myself!
David
David Graeber
olive...@tiscali.co.uk (Oliver Kamm) wrote:
As usual, Kamm's spewing of arrogant abuse is to mask his
own incompetence, lack of training, and penchant for
flat-out lying. In fact, his argument was precisely
as I described it. He said that he opposes debt relief
except if accompanied by infrastructural reforms. I will
provide the actual quotes:
------------
begin quote: Date: 2001-08-15 16:09:15 PST
------------
(this from an exchange with Darren Teale, who begins)
>
> WOW, you're a genius, who would of thought that countries cleared of
> debt would want more money to build an efficient infrastructure.
I would not "of" [sic] thought it myself, but then I know what I'm talking
about.
Unconditional debt relief has demonstrably not been followed by countries
using fresh
lending to build an efficient infrastructure. We have 20 years' experience
of this.
The 1977-79 UNCTAD meetings led to official creditors' forgiving $6
billion in debt to
45 poor countries. Unfortunately the measures were of little or negative value,
because it merely led to further concessionary finance rather than any
incentive to
build such an infrastructure. Leftists like me believe that debt relief
should be tied
to such spending.
>
>
> Step back for a moment and consider what debt relief is supposed to do,
> the cycle of poverty has to end somewhere, the hope for Jubilee is that
> the first word might spread some of the wealth.
On the contrary, it is the position of those Left-wingers like me and the
British
government who *oppose* unconditional debt relief that the cycle of
poverty has to end
somewhere, and who therefore want debt relief tied to macroeconomic reform and
infrastructure spending (which typically realise very high rates of return
in poor
countries). It is Right-wingers who favour unconditional debt relief who
offer athe
quickest route to a continued cycle of dependency and a crushing increase
in the cost
of capital.
---------
end of quote
---------
Now, what is the actual situation? Elected governments
in the global south are calling for unconditional debt
forgiveness. Kamm says he opposes these calls, and, indeed,
even opposes calls for more limited debt relief as long as
it is unconditional. Instead, he calls for "conditional
debt relief" - in other words, Western states and institutions
like the IMF must be able to maintain the ability to dictate
economic policy to these countries - this being the "macroeconomic
reform and infrastructure spending" he has in mind. He makes
the hilarious claim that this is a leftist position, despite
the fact that the only "leftist" group which he can identify
with this position is the British government, which in fact
rejects claims that it is "leftist" and instead claims
devotion to a "third way" between left and right, but
that part of Kamm's act is so silly we might as well just
ignore it. Similarly, the claim that it's only (or primarily)
people on the right who favor debt forgiveness - this
is a flat-out lie and Kamm knows it. Does he claim that
groups like Jubilee 2000 are right-wing? But this isn't the
particular lie we are dealing with here.
The point is that there is no reason why a country
having its debt forgiven could not engage in infrastructural
investment on its own, or "reform" its macroeconomic
structure pretty much any way it cared to - debt payments
take up such a huge portion of government outlays that
huge amounts of new funds would become available and, under
a democratic government, the people's elected representatives
would be the ones to decide how it would be spent. But this
is precisely the situation Kamm wishes to ensure does not
occur. Therefore, he insists that any forgiveness - any,
since he identifies with the Labor Policy, it is pretty
clear the sort of forgiveness he has in mind is a very
limited sort - be conditional on the recipients allowing
foreign economic "experts" such as himself (except of course
he does not appear to really be such an expert) having the
right to tell those elected governments how they should
be running their countries. For all the idealistic-sounding
rhetoric about breaking the cycle of poverty, what he
really means is "if these elected officials are allowed to
spend their nation's tax kingdom as that nation's taxpayers
see fit, they will spend it all wrong and everyone will
stay poor. Therefore we must not forgive the entire debt,
but only forgive part, and demand the right to control
exactly what they spend the money on in return because
they are not sufficiently responsible to decide how to
spend it themselves." Which is just the position I said he
took and to which he challenged me to provide evidence.
Once again, it's not as if there are any groups in
the global South, within debtor nations, calling for
Kamm's position. "We want conditional debt relief! Don't
give us unconditional relief! We demand that Western
economists continue to dictate our economic policy!
Do not give us the power - or even, our elected representatives
the power - to spend our own money as we see fit! We want
paternalistic foreign powers to tell them how to do it!"
By Kamm's terms, this would means there are no left-wingers
in the global South, since no one endorses the "left-wing"
position, but only the "right-wing" position which says
that the debt was illegitimate, and it should be
cancelled. But as I say, this part of Kamm's act is so
absurd no one takes it seriously.
DG
David Graeber
<Joaq...@aol.com> wrote:
Actually, they arrested the people in the park for
"failure to obey a police order" - when they finally
thought up a charge; people who asked why they were
being arrested at the time were told "we'll decide
that later." The charge was intentionally chosen
_because_ everyone involved knew it wasn't true: no
police order to disperse had been given, or any
other kind of order for that matter; and in fact
people in the park had been begging the police to
allow them to leave for almost an hour before they
were all arrested. In that case the police were
just interested in figuring out what they could
get away with. At A16, two years ago, they surrounded
some 900 people, ordered them to disperse, and then
prevented them from doing so; all were arrested. This
time they decided to see what would happen if they
just surrounded everyone and arrested them for no
reason at all (the park was predesignated as a "safe
area" in which no one was supposed to do anything
illegal; and again, no one was actually accused
of doing anything unlawful there. Even gathering without
a permit didn't apply because in D.C. it has to be
over 500 people before you need a permit to gather
in a park and the crowd there was around 400) - and
then later tacked on a charge that everyone knew to
be false. A false arrest suit is being organized but the
fact that police can now do mass arrests of people
who have broken no sort of law whatsoever, and then
keep them tied up for fourteen or fifteen hours,
extort money from them, fingerprint them and put
their names on data bases (most of those arrested
have complained that ever since, they are regularly
searched and delayed any time they try to fly on
a plane) - all merely because they were gathered at
a political event the government disapproves of, and
at which other people were practicing civil disobedience
- did not create any sort of scandal at all in the
so-called liberal press. Funny, since gathering in a
park to express a political opinion is exactly the sort
of behavior the bill of rights was designed to protect.
DG
Josh Dougherty
news:dgraeber-061...@204-74-0-116.c3-0.nyw-ubr2.nyr-nyw.ny.cable.r
cn.com...
David,
Kudos for once again exposing, by his own words, Oliver Kamm as the staunch
elitist, totalitarian, anti-democratic, right-wing extremist that he so
obviously is. (as well as..of course...his open and enthusiastic support
for fascist tyranny and brutality)
After reading what you've written here, as well as the preponderance of
previous (and surely forthcoming) evidence, one must surely agree with the
following 'ineluctable conclusions':
"As I have indicated, the view that [Oliver]...expresses is extremely
revealing: the people are too stupid and mindless to realise their own
interests.....The elitism and contempt it reveals undermines any notion that
[he] is speaking for the people."
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=40cd7d30.0211290749.5ae930%40posting.go
ogle.com
"Note also the elitism and snobbery underyling the sentiment quoted:
[democratically determining the course of their own economic lives] is not
appropriate for the [people's of the Thrid World], who are evidently in this
poster's view too unrefined and stupid to appreciate it [or understand it].
Again, we find the seeds of this type of approach in [Oliver's] work
proclaiming that the [lazy, shiftless and irresponsible Third World]
electorate are too stupid to [determine the course of their own economic
lives] without his critical guidance, but I confess that the extremism of
this type of elitism is displayed to a fuller glory still in the post [David
Graeber] quoted."
http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=40cd7d30.0212050409.5ac38ee%40posting.g
oogle.com
Josh
Oliver Kamm
"David Graeber" <dgra...@rcn.net> wrote in message
news:dgraeber-061...@204-74-0-116.c3-0.nyw-ubr2.nyr-nyw.ny.cable.r
cn.com...
The ng will be unsurprised that Graeber, having already been caught out with
a rather elastic approach to accuracy when recounting his resume, should
adopt a similar procedure when challenged to produce evidence for his
claims. Not only does the quoted exchange, say nothing remotely comparable
to the view he attributed to me, it says the exact opposite. I oppose
unconditional debt relief precisely because I do *not* want developing
countries to be beholden to the IMF, as would happen if the cost of capital
for these countries rose substantially and unexpectedly. That rise would
take place if debts were written off unconditionally, because lenders'
required risk premium would be higher. (If ng members want an explanation of
why this would happen, I will gladly post it.) Therefore developing
countries would find that the only source of fresh funds for investment
would be the World Bank and the IMF. It is Graeber, not I, who favours that
route.
Graeber is no skilled writer, and his attempt at irony falls flat, but of
course he is wrong in his account of the stance of the position of elected
Third World governments and civil society. As an affluent westerner who can
afford foreign holidays, he clearly hasn't got much interest in asking them,
but I have. I have spent a lot of time over many years talking to
policy-makers in Third World countries (not Africa, but Asia and Latin
America), and the postion that he finds impossible to credit is as I have
described it. These countries need access to foreign capital to fund the
current account deficits that naturally arise when they attempt to grow,
because their domestic savings are inadequate for their investment
opportunities (they are poor countries). If debt forgiveness were general
and complete, then these countries would *immediately* find that their cost
of capital would rise sharply, and their ability to invest and enhance
living standards would be constrained commensurately. Who then would they be
forced to go to? They would, in fact, be totally dependent on western
supranational institutions giving aid, and regard with great trepidation
calls for debt forgiveness other than the partial or conditional measures
adopted under the Brady Plans and their successors.
Once again, I urger Graeber to post evidence showing where I have ever said
debt relief for poor countries would be bad for the poor because IMF
economists would be unable to to tell governments how to run their
economies. My position is the opposite: *unconditional* and *complete* debt
forgiveness (Graeber is of course off on another of his flights of
imagination when he attributes to me the judgement that "any forgiveness ...
be conditional") would *ensure* that Third World governments could *not*
make their own economic decisions because they would not have access to
capital enabling them to do so.
I do urge Graeber to get a handle on this subject before exposing himself to
further ridicule.
Oliver Kamm
"Josh Dougherty" <j...@lynnpdesign.com> wrote in message
news:DVeI9.1110$G4.1...@newsread2.prod.itd.earthlink.net...
Not, I'm afraid, an intelligent post even by Dougherty's standards. I
challenge him, with no great expectation of a response but it will be fun to
see one if he is so minded, to find any statement by me that Third World
electorates are too stupid to determine their economic lives without my
critical guidance. Everything I have ever said about Third World development
is the opposite: I wish developing countries to have the capital required to
mount their own investment and growth, and I am afraid that that would not
be possible if there were unconditional debt forgiveness. The outcome of
such a policy would be a rise in developing countries' cost of capital and
thereby a restriction on their sources of funding. Dougherty is here arguing
that developing countries are not to be trusted with any more money except
whatever comes from rich world aid, the World Bank and IMF loans. Clearly he
has no respect for the Third World at all.
Oliver Kamm
"David Graeber" <dgra...@rcn.net> wrote in message
news:dgraeber-061...@204-74-0-116.c3-0.nyw-ubr2.nyr-nyw.ny.cable.r
cn.com...
> having its debt forgiven could not engage in infrastructural
> investment on its own, or "reform" its macroeconomic
> structure pretty much any way it cared to - debt payments
> take up such a huge portion of government outlays that
> huge amounts of new funds would become available and, under
> a democratic government, the people's elected representatives
> would be the ones to decide how it would be spent.
Meant to comment on this, and inadvertently omitted to do so. It is well
worth highlighting, because it is an astonishingly revealing indication not
only of Graeber's economic illiteracy but also of a disturbingly rabid
anti-Third World and xenophobic stance. My argument, as readers of this
exchange will have observed, is that the Third World desperately needs to be
able to lift itself out of poverty, and to do that it needs capital for
investment purposes. Graeber is here seriously suggesting that the Third
World has quite enough money already and shiuldn't have any more.
I will not insult the intelligence of these ngs by expounding the
relationship between savings and investment (though a mischievous streak
might tempt me to suggest Graeber try doing so instead. Perhaps he should
consult the remrakable works of 'George Stiglitz'). Suffice to say that the
Third World has far more investment needs/opportunities than it has domestic
savings (that's part of what it is to be a poor country). In order to
exploit those investment opportunities and increase its people's standard of
living, a developing country desperately needs foreign savings (as domestic
savings by definition are insufficient) in order to fund its current account
deficit. Yet according to Graeber, IT DOESN'T AT ALL. The Third World, in
Graeber's judgement, ALREADY HAS ALL THE MONEY IT REQUIRES, or at least it
will do once its debts are written off.
Few things about extreme Rightists of the Chomskyite wing of politics would
surprise me any longer (on the Chomsky ng we are quite used to having links
to pro-Nazi sites posted), but this, I confess, takes me aback. Graeber
genuinely believes that the Third World already has quite enough money for
the standard of living he believes it is entitled to, and shouldn't get any
more from abroad. His position may accurately be summarised as, "I'm a rich
kid on an Ivy League campus, and the Third World can get along fine without
any assistance from me."
Breathtaking.
snd
> The black bloc uniform is almost as funny as pacifists with
> molotov cocktails. One can imagine anarchists wearing
> uniforms, several different uniforms, but when there is only
> one uniform, the claim to be anarchists is as doubtful as the
> claim to be pacifists.
You will have to spell out your reasoning here.
> It seems to me that the real function of the uniform is to
> provide a sense of identity, unity and cohesion, much like the
> blackshirt uniform.
And how exactly is that counter to anarchism?
Does
anarchism = non-sense of identity?
anarchism = non-unity?
anarchism = non-cohesion?
You will have to make a coherent argument if you wish others to follow it.
James A. Donald
On Sat, 7 Dec 2002 20:03:15 -0500, "snd" <s...@snd.com> wrote:
> > The black bloc uniform is almost as funny as pacifists with
> > molotov cocktails. One can imagine anarchists wearing
> > uniforms, several different uniforms, but when there is only
> > one uniform, the claim to be anarchists is as doubtful as the
> > claim to be pacifists.
>
> You will have to spell out your reasoning here.
>
> > It seems to me that the real function of the uniform is to
> > provide a sense of identity, unity and cohesion, much like the
> > blackshirt uniform.
>
> And how exactly is that counter to anarchism?
One uniform implies unity and cohesion to a single body.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
u6SeallcbyfI4KaAqbW0gNSGGl14SovxX+6RbE0j
4EmkQR0qJlmt/638CDQU2N9doI2kpMorT/KuivYUw
snd
> > > It seems to me that the real function of the uniform is to
> > > provide a sense of identity, unity and cohesion, much like the
> > > blackshirt uniform.
> >
> > And how exactly is that counter to anarchism?
>
> One uniform implies unity and cohesion to a single body.
Again, how is that counter to anarchism in this context?
David Graeber
<olive...@tiscali.co.uk> wrote:
> "David Graeber" <dgra...@rcn.net> wrote in message
> news:dgraeber-061...@204-74-0-116.c3-0.nyw-ubr2.nyr-nyw.ny.cable.r
> cn.com...
> > The point is that there is no reason why a country
> > having its debt forgiven could not engage in infrastructural
> > investment on its own, or "reform" its macroeconomic
> > structure pretty much any way it cared to - debt payments
> > take up such a huge portion of government outlays that
> > huge amounts of new funds would become available and, under
> > a democratic government, the people's elected representatives
> > would be the ones to decide how it would be spent.
>
> Meant to comment on this, and inadvertently omitted to do so. It is well
> worth highlighting, because it is an astonishingly revealing indication not
> only of Graeber's economic illiteracy but also of a disturbingly rabid
> anti-Third World and xenophobic stance. My argument, as readers of this
> exchange will have observed, is that the Third World desperately needs to be
> able to lift itself out of poverty, and to do that it needs capital for
> investment purposes. Graeber is here seriously suggesting that the Third
> World has quite enough money already and shiuldn't have any more.
Nonsense, and Kamm knows he is lying his head off.
But before going on, allow me to summarize the
argument so far.
DG: I challenge Kamm to prove he's really
an economist, or has any actual accreditations
or accomplishments in this field.
Kamm: (no reply).
DG: Kamm is also such an elitist he says X.
Kamm: DG lies! I never said X! I challenge DG to
show me where I said X!
DG: Ok, here's a passage where Kamm said X.
Kamm: Well, that's because X is so obviously true
that only a complete economic illiterate would possibly
deny it.
No humiliation will stop Kamm from pretending
to victory. Since, as I keep saying, he's only
got one move - well, two, either to accuse you of
being soft on Nazis (despite the fact that he is
himself a cheerleader for Nazis when they are
not just sounding off on web sites but torturing
political dissidents, as in Genoa), or claim they
are laughable economic illiterates (despite the
fact that he does not appear to be a trained
economist at all, or certainly one of any
accomplishments whatever) - he has to find some
kind of economic position to attribute to me, so
as to be able to accuse me of being a laughable
idiot. Problem is: I have not actually stated
any positions, just pointed out the hypocrisy of
his own. So he must invent positions to put in my mouth
so he can then start cawing about how ignorant and
reactionary I am. In this case he has almost nothing
to work with because the only position I have
actually stated is that I think that debt
relief should not come with conditions attached.
That's it. To watch him twisting and writhing
about trying to make up an economic position to
ascribe to me, so he can then claim that I am an
ignoramus for holding it, is a truly pathetic
spectacle, like a man tossing socks in the air
and then screaming "ha ha! you try to attack me
with socks, do you, Graeber! you are pathetic!"
Once again the man doesn't have the slightest
idea what I would actually propose - only that I
am arguing that his proposal, which seems to
reproduce Tony Blair's, for extremely limited
debt relief with lots of strings attached, giving
Western economists the right to (continue to)
dictate other countries' policies, is
is arrogant and elitist. That's all. All that
I said. The rest is a tissue of fantasies he's
created so as to be able to sneer at them. It is
a truly pathetic performance, but what else would
you expect coming from a man who, presented with
a description of overt fascists directing
Italian police to torture dissidents under
pictures of Mussolini, replies "Go Italian police!"
DG
Guilherme C Roschke
>
> One uniform implies unity and cohesion to a single body.
>
-gr
Josh Dougherty
news:3df21...@mk-nntp-2.news.uk.tiscali.com...
David Graeber has just posted one, and I can find another one here directly
following:
> I wish developing countries to have the capital required to
> mount their own investment and growth, and I am afraid....
Here it comes .....the critical guidance without which the stupid and
befuddled electorates of the Third World would go about harming themselves,
like children:
> that that would not be possible if there were unconditional debt
forgiveness. The outcome of
> such a policy would be a rise in developing countries' cost of capital and
> thereby a restriction on their sources of funding.
So without the West imposing their conditions, the Third World could not run
their own affairs and would harm themselves. Well, the stupid electorates
of the Third World obviously don't understand this. They propose the crazy
idea of unconditional debt relief. They don't say "please impose conditions
of your choosing on the minimal debt relief you grant us. You know what's
good for us and we would be too stupid to make the right choices." Thank
goodness that you are imposing your critical guidance on them. Like a
stupid child who doesn't want to eat his vegetables or wants to run accross
the street without looking both ways, the people's of Third World countries
simply do not know what's good for them, and require a rational and
responsible parent to force them to eat the vegetables and to look both
ways, for their own good. When the children grow up, if ever, they'll be
thankful for this critical guidance that has saved them from themselves.
Josh
Matt
"Josh Dougherty" <j...@lynnpdesign.com> wrote:
> > that that would not be possible if there were unconditional debt
> > forgiveness. The outcome of such a policy would be a rise in
> > developing countries' cost of capital and thereby a restriction on
> > their sources of funding.
> So without the West imposing their conditions, the Third World could not run
> their own affairs and would harm themselves.
Your summary of his argument seems to have no bearing on what he said; I
can't see any resemblance at all.
--
Matt
snd
> >But, but, but David, the fact that you were there and saw
> >this stuff *proves* that you are an Evil Lying Leftist
> >Anarchist Stalinist Pinko Commie Liar who lies and lies and
> >lies and never tells the truth, who even lies when he tells
> >the truth....
>
> Anyone who has dealt with Graeber before already has plenty of
> independent reason to consider him a compulsive liar, among other
> things.
>
Well, that's a compelling response.
One of the "other things" is that of author. His _Toward An Anthropological
Theory of Value_ is an interesting book on value and exchange. It serves as
a nice complement to economics study.
Yeah, David, someone on Usenet bought your book. ;-)
Josh Dougherty
news:anonymatt-B5047...@corp.supernews.com...
Do you know what 2 + 2 makes Matt?
Josh
David Graeber
Dougherty" <j...@lynnpdesign.com> wrote:
> "Matt" <anon...@bigfoot.com> wrote in message
> news:anonymatt-B5047...@corp.supernews.com...
> > In article <VvzI9.10431$kz2.1...@newsread1.prod.itd.earthlink.net>,
> > "Josh Dougherty" <j...@lynnpdesign.com> wrote:
> >
> > > > that that would not be possible if there were unconditional debt
> > > > forgiveness. The outcome of such a policy would be a rise in
> > > > developing countries' cost of capital and thereby a restriction on
> > > > their sources of funding.
> >
> > > So without the West imposing their conditions, the Third World could not
> run
> > > their own affairs and would harm themselves.
> >
> > Your summary of his argument seems to have no bearing on what he said; I
> > can't see any resemblance at all.
>
> Do you know what 2 + 2 makes Matt?
Well, it's partly because he made two arguments:
first, that if debt was simply forgiven, no one would make
further loans to said country; second, he claims "studies
have shown" that if debt was simply forgiven, those countries
would not spend their newfound resources (all that income
they would otherwise be spending on debt service) the way
Kamm thinks they should, and that therefore it is necessary
to condition any relief on the money being spent on infrastructural
projects and "macroeconomic reform". The first is dubious, but
irrelevant to present purposes. The second is the point I was
addressing. Ever since the Baker plan of 1985 it has been the policy
of the US government, among others, to use debt negotiations
as a tool to demand debtor nations allow institutions like
the IMF and World Bank to dictate their economic policy to debtor
nations, resulting in an endless series of "structural adjustment
policies" (SAPs), which were touted as ways to restore economic
health, attract investment, and make such countries better
able to repay their loans, in much the way that Kamm talks
about his proposals. In fact they have had the effect of
causing massive increases in poverty and inequality just about
everywhere they have been instituted, and at best tepid and
fragile growth, often, none at all.
Actually, the ensuing disaster was admitted even by
those international agencies that were willing to report
on the matter honestly. One 15 year survey on IMF SAP
programs reported that "the growth rate is significantly
reduced in program countries relative to the change in non-program
countries." Many economists suggest this is because
SAPs had brought about in Third World countries the same
conundrum that stymied the mature industrial economies
during the Great Depression, which Keynesian demand-side
economics was designed to solve. That is, economies under
adjustment are stuck in a low-level trap, in which low investment,
increased unemployment, reduced social spending, reduced consumption,
and low output interact to create a vicious cycle of stagnation and
decline (rather than a virtuous circle of growth, rising employment,
and rising investment, as originally envisaged).
Despite this, they IMF and World Bank simply insisted on
more and more of the same. In Latin America, during the period
of structural adjustment, the numbers of people living in poverty
rose from 130 million in 1980 to 180 million at the beginning of
the 1990s. Distribution of income also became increasingly
polarized. In Africa, the number of people living below the poverty
line now stands at 200 million of the region's 690 million
people and growing.
Despite all this, the Third World's debt burden did not
shrink but actually rose from $785 billion at the beginning
of the debt crisis to nearly $1.5 trillion in 1993. Take Africa.
Thirty-six of its 47 countries have been subjected to SAPS
by now, yet the total external debt of the continent is now 110
percent of its gross national product.
(All of this is in dramatic contrast by the way to the '60s,
'70s and '80s, in which economic growth rates in these same parts
of the world were quite high.)
What's Kamm's solution to this use of the debt burden
by Western economists to force countries to institute
economic policies they claim will improve things, but which
have in fact devastated them? To allow Western economists to
use the debt burden to force these same countries to institute
economic policies which they claim will improve things. What
he is suggesting sure sounds a lot to me like yet more
structural adjustment ("macroeconomic reform"), with some
new investment in infrastructural projects (the sort of thing
the World Bank has been doing for years). This is the kind
of "debt relief" currently being pushed by the IMF itself,
and while New Labour might have a slightly more
generous version of same (actually, here I must confess I
don't know, because I'm not familiar with their
particular proposals) it seems quite clear to me we're
just talking about more of the same: give the so-called
"experts" who created the disaster in the first place yet
more opportunity to tell other countries how to run their
economies.
DG
Oliver Kamm
As Matt observes, and Dougherty is unable to deny, this risible remark has
nothing whatever to do with the argument I have put. A rise in the cost of
capital and a restriction on sources of funding is a description of the
environment within which Third World countries must manage their economies:
it is what would arise with unconditional debt forgiveness. If Dougherty
denies that their cost of capital would rise in such circumstances, then I
suggest he engages me in debate on the matter.
Oliver Kamm
I have no doubt he does, but Dougherty apparently does not. Unconditional
debt forgiveness would mean lenders' required risk premia would rise,
thereby causing a rise in the interest rate paid on sovereign borrowing by
developing countries, therefore making it more difficult for them to obtain
funding for their current account deficits, therefore making it more
difficult for them to grow, therefore making it more difficult for them to
improve their standards of living, therefore keeping the poor poor. Do you
understand this sequence, Dougherty? If not, please tell us, and I will take
you through it.
Oliver Kamm
cn.com...
> In article <3df23...@mk-nntp-2.news.uk.tiscali.com>, "Oliver Kamm"
> <olive...@tiscali.co.uk> wrote:
>
> > "David Graeber" <dgra...@rcn.net> wrote in message
> >
news:dgraeber-061...@204-74-0-116.c3-0.nyw-ubr2.nyr-nyw.ny.cable.r
> > cn.com...
> > World has quite enough money already and shiuldn't have any more.
>
> Nonsense, and Kamm knows he is lying his head off.
Oh no he isn't, and I can understand Graeber's embarrassment at being caught
out opining that the Third World is quite rivh enough as it is.
I have argued in in an accompanying post that general unconditional debt
forgiveness would be a disastrous course for the developing world because it
would sharply constrain their access to foreign capital (owing to a rise in
lenders' required risk premia and hence a rise in developing countries' cost
of capital). Graeber has no problem with this scenario because he believes
that, once these countries' debt servicing obligations are eliminated then
they'll have all the capital they need - evidently he believes these
countries are so wealthy that their stock of domestic savings is more than
sufficient for anything they could possibly want. On the Graeber plan, a
rise in developing countries' cost of capital doesn't matter, because they
don't need the money anyway
The question then arises of the role of the supranational agencies. One
consequence of forcing Third Wortld countries to pay more for their
borrowing is to ensure that they would have to fall back on the World Bank
and (for short-term purposes) the IMF rather than private lenders. Graeber
has cut-and-pasted a litany of complaints against these supranational
bodies, not all of which I disagree with - there is a moral hazard problem
that the IMF is right to be wary of, lest other developing nations be hurt
by policy applied to a debtor nation, but that problem is well-known in
international policy-making - but the irony is that Graeber's insistence
that the Third World is quite well-off enough already is the surest way of
restricting Third World capital sources to the World Bank. We know that this
is true because it is what has actually happened. Take the contrasting cases
of India and Cote d'Ivoire, both developing countries. In the late 1990s
Cote d'Ivoire received more than 1200 times more per capita aid flows than
India - the sole reason for that is that the government of Cote d'Ivoire
spent lavishly on creating two new national capitals (home towns of
successive leaders), and thereby creating a huge budget deficit and by that
course a huge current account deficit. Inflation rose, causing the currency
to appreciate in real terms (because the exchange rate was fixed). That
reinforced the large external deficit, and then caused a doubling of the
external debt. What happened? Debt forgiveness, whereupon the government of
Cote d'Ivoire responded by systematically embezzling EU aid.
Who pays for all this? Why, countries like India pay for it, because they
have endeavoured to build up creditworthiness in international finance,
whereupon they - not western banks, not western taxpayers - have to bail out
governments that are corrupt and oppressive. Where then can they get sources
of funding? Well, the World Bank and just about noweher else. Graeber
apparently sees nothing wrong with clobbering the poorest people in the
world, but as a leftist I do. I am still waiting for him to substantiate his
claim that I believe debt relief for poor countries would be bad for the
poor because IMF economists would be unable to to tell governments how to
run their economies - but then I suppose pigs might fly too. We must presume
that Graeber is as accurate in his rendition of leftist arguments as he is
in giving an account of his academic resume.
snd
"Guilherme C Roschke" <gros...@luminousvoid.net> wrote in message
news:Pine.GSO.4.44.021207...@unagi.cis.upenn.edu...
Do you suppose that members or employees of enforcement agencies in an
anarcho-capitalist society would be disallowed from wearing the same or
similar uniforms, since James considers that practice in some way counter to
anarchism?
;-)
snd
> In article <66dc0679.02120...@posting.google.com>,
> bk...@hotmail.com (brian turner) wrote:
>
> No one is saying Kamm can't comment on economics. What
> we are challenging is Kamm's insistence that (a) he is an
> expert on economics, and (b) no one who is not an expert
> on economics such as himself has the right to comment on
> anything. His entire internet career is based on sneering
> contemptuously at anyone who disagrees with him, saying
> that he is a scholar, a scientist, an expert in economics
> and they are obviously a ignorant illiterate fool whose
> opinions are worthless. If so, it seems reasonable for
> those who are the objects of his endless sneering and
> verbal abuse to ask the self-proclaimed expert why they
> should believe he really is an expert to begin with.
> To ask him to produce some evidence. A degree. A publication.
> Some work he is done which has been examined by other scholars
> in the field and not found wanting. Something to back up
> his endless claims of intellectual superiority.
>
> In response he has managed to produce nothing - no
> evidence that he actually is an expert on economics of
> any kind. It is hard to escape the conclusion
> that the man is simply a fraud.
> DG
That is a pretty good response. In other circumstances, I would say that the
quality of the individual's commentary would suffice to show whether or not
he/she is an expert in the subject matter, but your charges of Kamm's
disparaging the knowledge and intellectual status of everyone who doesn't
agree with him ring true for anyone who has read his posts.
I will grant that I am psychologizing, but his condescending attitude seems
forced, like someone with self-esteem issues. That is only my opinion, but I
believe others would sense some truth to it.
It is embarassing to say that I agree with Kamm on some issues, and
similarly I think he is a huge embarassment for more balanced and worthwhile
critics of Chomsky such as Russil Wvong and Nathan Folkert, as well as
others who take similar positions to Kamm on various topics. They may not
feel that way, but I know that I do.
snd
> I should add that, for all my affection for Mr Graeber, the sight of a
rich
> kid [..]
And supposing he were rich, so what? Would that thereby affect the quality
of his argument? Would he earn brownie points in your world if he were
poor?
James A. Donald
, "snd" <s...@nowhere.com>wrote:
> Do you suppose that members or employees of enforcement
> agencies in an anarcho-capitalist society would be disallowed
> from wearing the same or similar uniforms,
Different agencies would use different uniforms, to the extent
that they wore uniforms at all. If they all wore the same or
similar uniforms, one would suspect that the system was
feudalism, not anarcho capitalism.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
gKvwJsAcMEJpnrzHFlNBknvpwTMVWkzk64Cw1a3j
4ruw35sgs8lpXxJPMhN3JPtS0xvKj4Fa3d+zoEZDm
snd
> > Do you suppose that members or employees of enforcement
> > agencies in an anarcho-capitalist society would be disallowed
> > from wearing the same or similar uniforms,
>
> Different agencies would use different uniforms, to the extent
> that they wore uniforms at all. If they all wore the same or
> similar uniforms, one would suspect that the system was
> feudalism, not anarcho capitalism.
But individuals within the same enforcement agency would presumably wear the
same uniform. That is, assuming a uniform of some kind would be needed for
recognition of their status. Probably in many cases it clearly will be, for
many of the same reasons that private security guards wear uniforms. This
is sufficient to show the failings of your comments concerning the Black
Bloc, as they are not members of competing Black Blocs.
Taking this a step further, there is a good likelihood that the relevant
employees of all security agencies will wear a uniform that will be
immediately recognizable as that of a member of an enforcement agency, much
like many security guards, no matter who they are working for, generally
wear garb that makes their status readily apparent.
And that last paragraph is sufficient to show that you can not suspect that
a system is not anarcho-capitalist based on the decision of enforcement
agencies to wear similar uniforms.
James A. Donald
snd:
> > > Do you suppose that members or employees of enforcement
> > > agencies in an anarcho-capitalist society would be
> > > disallowed from wearing the same or similar uniforms,
James A. Donald:
> > Different agencies would use different uniforms, to the
> > extent that they wore uniforms at all. If they all wore
> > the same or similar uniforms, one would suspect that the
> > system was feudalism, not anarcho capitalism.
snd:
> But individuals within the same enforcement agency would
> presumably wear the same uniform.
Probably
> That is, assuming a uniform of some kind would be needed for
> recognition of their status.
They do not have any status. If they do it is feudalism, or
tending towards feudalism. An employee of an enforcement
agency should have no special power to use force that anyone
else does not have. To the extent that he does have, de facto
or de-jure, the system tends towards hi-tech feudalism.
> Taking this a step further, there is a good likelihood that
> the relevant employees of all security agencies will wear a
> uniform that will be immediately recognizable as that of a
> member of an enforcement agency, much like many security
> guards, no matter who they are working for, generally wear
> garb that makes their status readily apparent.
Security guards in the mall near me wear a markedly different
costume to the security guard that guards the till at Toy R Us
near me during the christmas rush. All the till guarding
guards near where I live wear the same uniform though they
work in different shops, because they are in fact subject to
the same employer, who has a semi monopoly due to state
regulation. Similarly, all the rentacops in San Francisco wear
the same uniform, but it is slightly different to that of the
till guards near where I live -- a short distance from San
Francisco.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
gccB6euSeezHQkWdrfNpKQqyZNjxMkvllkeTlx2r
4uvB0WpIewtdNXdd1GBYK+dZA/GqzJz6Un0ZTPicb
James A. Donald
snd:
> This is sufficient to show the failings of your comments
> concerning the Black Bloc, as they are not members of
> competing Black Blocs.
If it is all one big Black Bloc, then since the original Black
Bloc was obviously Marxist/Leninist ......
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
+kQNUJL5l86KJKCmiM30COZSYGVc2qSX9jVCwe85
4U7h7LnfSuqtGafd8mRBGxS1FxclY39s+hZpGYX57
David Graeber
<olive...@tiscali.co.uk> wrote:
> "David Graeber" <dgra...@rcn.net> wrote in message
> news:dgraeber-081...@204-74-0-116.c3-0.nyw-ubr2.nyr-nyw.ny.cable.r
> cn.com...
> > Well, it's partly because he made two arguments:
> > first, that if debt was simply forgiven, no one would make
> > further loans to said country; second, he claims "studies
> > have shown" that if debt was simply forgiven, those countries
> > would not spend their newfound resources (all that income
> > they would otherwise be spending on debt service) the way
> > Kamm thinks they should, and that therefore it is necessary
> > to condition any relief on the money being spent on infrastructural
> > projects and "macroeconomic reform". The first is dubious, but
> > irrelevant to present purposes.
>
> Again, an absurd and economically illiterate remark. First, it is highly
> pertinent that if debt forgiveness were unconditional then developing
> countries would find access to additional funding sharply constrained
> because their cost of capital would rise. Graeber sees no problem with
> this - he explicitly said it would be OK because these countries would no
> longer have debt service obligations, so therefore he clearly thinks
> developing countries have all the capital they need already. Secondly,
> requiring that debt forgiveness be conditional on making sure they don't
> incur future debts unrelated to investment is precisely what Third World
> civil society requires and requests, because they don't want access to
> capital markets to be restricted as Graeber does.
>
> I would add that I have already said to these ngs that I do not consider my
> academic and professional background to be relevant to ngs, though you may
> be assured that unlike some people (one on particular) I do not fabricate my
> resume.
Once again, the troll desperately tries to find a
concrete argument he can pillory as "ignorant". My
point was that he wants to use the debt to force
debtor governments to adopt policies he choses. His
reasons for thinking this advisable are irrelevant to
that fact. All his ranting and huffing and sneering
comes down to saying "but I am right, they _do_ need
to be forced to do as I tell them, it's for their
own good." But all the sneering in the world cannot
disguise the fact that he did in fact make this argument.
He denied it. He challenged me to come up with evidence.
I did. And now, caught with his pants down, caught in a
humiliating lie, he tries to cover up by inventing
economic arguments to ascribe to me.
Once again, the conversation so far:
DG: I challenge you to prove you are really an
economist.
Kamm (embarassed silence)
DG: what's more he thinks debtor nations are
too stupid to govern their own affairs and wishes
to use the debt to force them to adopt policies he
approves of
Kamm: no I don't! I never said that! I challenge
you to prove I did!
DG: okay, how 'bout this quote where you say
just that.
Kamm: aha! that's because it's true and anyone
who denies it is an economic illiterate...
and yadda yadda yadda sneer sneer sneer yadda
yadda I am an economist (not) yadda yadda sneer
you are a pathetic illiterate yadda yadda you
say this argument I made up that argument I made
up yadda yadda sneer sneer snort huff I laugh
hysterically at your pathetic positions (which I
made up) yadda sneer snort cackle caw, etc
DG
David Graeber
<olive...@tiscali.co.uk> wrote:
> "David Graeber" <dgra...@rcn.net> wrote in message
> news:dgraeber-071...@204-74-0-116.c3-0.nyw-ubr2.nyr-nyw.ny.cable.r
> cn.com...
> > In article <3df23...@mk-nntp-2.news.uk.tiscali.com>, "Oliver Kamm"
> > <olive...@tiscali.co.uk> wrote:
> >
> > > "David Graeber" <dgra...@rcn.net> wrote in message
> > >
> news:dgraeber-061...@204-74-0-116.c3-0.nyw-ubr2.nyr-nyw.ny.cable.r
> > > cn.com...
> Graeber is here seriously suggesting that the Third
> > > World has quite enough money already and shiuldn't have any more.
> >
> > Nonsense, and Kamm knows he is lying his head off.
>
> Oh no he isn't, and I can understand Graeber's embarrassment at being caught
> out opining that the Third World is quite rivh enough as it is.
I made no such argument at all. Kamm is just
applying his pathetic strategy of trying desperately
to elicit some economic statement which he can then
sneer at as illiterate. Since I have intentionally made
none, he finds it difficult to play his usual game -
but of course, since it's the only game he knows how
to play (he is a very simple-minded and predictable
troll, who really only has two tricks in his repertoire,
the Nazi-accusation and the economic-illiteracy-accusation,
and has no idea what to do if he can't use either)
he has no choice. So he makes positions up to attribute
to me.
But I do think huge amounts of wealth are currently
being drained from debtor nations to rich ones (enough
to make even former executive director of the World Bank
remark that "Not since the conquistadors plundered Latin
America has the world experienced a flow in the direction
we see today.") And I think it would be a good idea to
stop draining wealth from desperately poor nations, a
process over which organizations like the IMF have been
presiding, which has caused almost unimaginable misery
and death, and to which I see no evidence Kamm has any
notable objections . Would it be a good idea to reverse
the flow as well? Sure. Who said otherwise? I merely
wanted to point out that Kamm doesn't believe that the
democratically elected governments of debtor nations should
be allowed to decide how to invest their own tax revenue
if they are finally allowed to keep it for themselves.
And this remains true. Even if it were true that Kamm
actually believes that this is because if they were
free to spend their own money as they saw fit they
would spend it in ways that would discourage foreign
investors, he still doesn't want to persuade them
to adopt other policies, he wants to force them to
adopt them. And frankly, I think his whole argument is
specious but let's not even get into that.
DG
Joaquin67
James A. Donald <jam...@echeque.com> wrote:
> --
>On Sat, 7 Dec 2002 20:03:15 -0500, "snd" <s...@snd.com> wrote:
>
>> > The black bloc uniform is almost as funny as pacifists with
>> > molotov cocktails. One can imagine anarchists wearing
>> > uniforms, several different uniforms, but when there is only
>> > one uniform, the claim to be anarchists is as doubtful as the
>> > claim to be pacifists.
>>
>> You will have to spell out your reasoning here.
>>
>> > It seems to me that the real function of the uniform is to
>> > provide a sense of identity, unity and cohesion, much like the
>> > blackshirt uniform.
>>
>> And how exactly is that counter to anarchism?
>
>One uniform implies unity and cohesion to a single body.
>
>
> --digsig
people participating in a black bloc are not uniformed. the
greatest extent of this so called uniform is that most of them
will be wearing black pants and a black shirt or hoodie. people
often wear hats and bandanas too. but there is no requirement
for any of this. people wear whatever they want. go find some
pictures of black blocs and look.
the black in black bloc refers to the black of anarchy. people
often wear black in solidarity and for anonymity. it makes it
hard for the forces of the state to single anyone out and makes
it easier for others to rescue people in the process of being
kidnapped by the police. black bloc = tactic, =/= uniform
issuing body.
matt
Guilherme C Roschke
> > agencies in an anarcho-capitalist society would be disallowed
> > from wearing the same or similar uniforms,
>
> Different agencies would use different uniforms, to the extent
> that they wore uniforms at all. If they all wore the same or
> similar uniforms, one would suspect that the system was
> feudalism, not anarcho capitalism.
>
thing, would this be an anarcho capitalist society or the black block?
-gr
Guilherme C Roschke
> > That is, assuming a uniform of some kind would be needed for
> > recognition of their status.
>
> They do not have any status.
perhaps "role" would be a better word.
-gr
Joaquin67
James A. Donald <jam...@echeque.com> wrote:
> --
>snd:
>> This is sufficient to show the failings of your comments
>> concerning the Black Bloc, as they are not members of
>> competing Black Blocs.
>
>If it is all one big Black Bloc, then since the original Black
>Bloc was obviously Marxist/Leninist ......
>
> --digsig
> James A. Donald
yeah, those crazy german autonomous marxist squatters.
but its ok, because there isn't one big black bloc. you see, the
black bloc is a tatic. so there can't be one big black bloc in
the same way that there can't be one big civil disobedience. of
course, any particular black bloc will consist of a group of
people, much like any particular act of civil disobedience will
consist of a group of people. now you complain that people
involved in a black bloc all dress the same (more or less) and
carry out similar actions. but those acts are part of the
tactic. you can't engage in a black bloc by yourself, or if you
think that the police are to be obeyed without question. that's
just part of what it means to do a black bloc.
matt
snd
Yeah, it would be. I didn't mean status in the sense of an elevated
position.
snd
"James A. Donald" <jam...@echeque.com> wrote in message
news:1917vuc5srj4q7b25...@4ax.com...
> --
> snd:
> > This is sufficient to show the failings of your comments
> > concerning the Black Bloc, as they are not members of
> > competing Black Blocs.
>
> If it is all one big Black Bloc, then since the original Black
> Bloc was obviously Marxist/Leninist ......
All I said that was that they were not members of competing Black Blocs.
Josh Dougherty
It has everything to do with it. It is your argument.
> A rise in the cost of
> capital and a restriction on sources of funding is a description of the
> environment within which Third World countries must manage their
economies:
> it is what would arise with unconditional debt forgiveness.
Why Oliver? Why would the civil societies of the Third World not enact the
policies that those imposing the conditions, and you, know are good for
them?
And furthermore, why would they not enact them under conditions of
unconditional debt forgiveness given that, as you say, it is what they
"request"? If it's what they want, then outside imposed conditions that aim
to force them to do it are unnecessary. Right?
Josh