Sxip released a beta of openID firefox extension
on
The Case for OpenID
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· Score: 1
Sxipper just came out today in beta, it looks interesting. Sort of like a much nicer roboform with OpenID support baked in, and collaborative form mapping (and for firefox of course). Check it out.
And the last two decades have seen the installation of a lot of judges whose philosophies are decidedly pro-business with a jaundiced eye for monopoly regulation, as well as a large number of legislators and at least two Presidents, even three as Clinton wasn't exactly a flaming socialist, turning a blind eye and a curious lack of oversight as the Baby Bells merged together again.
I'm not going to address your other points as others have already carried on the discussion (notably RevMike) below. But I will take umbrage with your implication that if Clinton was a 'flaming socialist' [sic] the Bells may be serving the public better today than they now are.
When was the last time you lived in a legitimately socialist country and tried to get services from the state telecom provider? If Clinton was a flaming socialist the situation today would likely be much closer to the dark days of Ma Bell than it is today. Or are you forgetting that it was the administration of that flaming capitalist Reagan that oversaw the initial breakup of the state-sanctioned Bell monopoly. Or that the strongest defense of the end-to-end principle from within government was presented by Michael Powell?
A capitalist would resist regulatory frameworks that benefit private interests at the expense of the market; private interest regulation tends to thrive under flaming socialists--witness the longstanding telecom monopoly in recovering-from-socialism Mexico where using VOIP over the telecom's network is techincally against the law. In practice, and pretty much in practical theory, socialism tends towards being indistinguishable from mercantilism.
I think the US is a sinking ship and we would all be best served by attempting to dissociate from them before they drag us with them to the bottom.
Your post is long on invective and broad statements, but short on reason and details. Who praytell is set to dominate world economics, innovation, research, higher education, etc. etc.. Seriously, it's one thing for you to sit around in your office and spout off such drivel, but have you taken a look at bond yeilds, FDI flows, foriegn investment in US real estate, etc? Smart money is betting on America; it's still the destination of choice when there is a flight to safety.
> Since when are Democrats "the most liberal of parties"? What about socialists?
You can't be seriously so out of touch with political discourse to think liberalism, at any point along it's centuries of history, let alone as a whole tradition has anything to do with socialism. Socialists are anti-liberal almost by definition.
I know I'm coming into this thread late, but you've completely piqued my interest with this concept. Please take the earlier considerations to heart and consider the options. This is such a great idea.
Re:Stopped reading it when it got so political...
on
The Onion in 2056
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· Score: 1
I find it extremely humorous that the same network that delivers Fox News also delivers 'The Simpsons', 'Family Guy', and that new show about the CIA Dad, with the Extra-Terrestrial live-in etc...
Don't forget that HarperCollins, another subsidiary of News Corp., publishes Michael Moore. Yeah, that Murdoch is all about brainwashing a strident right-wing agenda alright. Either that or he just wants to sell books and make money as much as Moore does.
German wages are among the highest in the world. In addition, employers must pay heavy social-security contributions and other costs, which add another 80% to their bill. As a result, the average German manufacturing worker costs $28 an hour to hire, compared with $18 for an American or $17 for a Frenchman. True, productivity is high in Germany, but not high enough to compensate for those costs. To regain competitiveness, wages must fall or productivity must rise. The country's powerful trade unions are fighting wage cuts, so firms are trying to boost productivity or expand production abroad. In the short term, that means fewer jobs.
In the parent post, it says in the first paragraph that Germany has 12.6% unemployment. Also in the first paragraph, it says that Europe has "had to" import huge amounts of foreign labor.
How does that make sense?
Ask the Bundesrat.
The labor market in Germany is currently structured in such a way so as to discourage employers from hiring workers. The value of the amount of labor they can get by adding an employee in many cases is much smaller than the cost of doing so, especially given the long-term risk, since it's very difficult to legally lay off employees if a firm goes south. The problem is a big one that may persist for some time as the country re-organizes its social structures, but it is being felt heavily in the short term.
The long-term problem is that Germany needs to, over the long term, bring in foreign workers to maintain it's population, to continue to fund the very expensive social programs and government pensions. It shouldn't surprise you that Germany has a severe baby boomer problem as a result of WWII. But the effects of the demographic bulge have been made much worse as the German birthrate has sunk. Check out this animation
According to the most recent estimate by the Council of Europe, Germany had a Net Reproduction Rate of 0.66 in 1999. In other words, due to its reproductive behavior the population of Germany is shrinking by 34% between generations.
Please note that this natural population decline is currently not obvious, because it is compensated by high net-immigration and a temporarily higher number of births due to age structure effects. There is still a relatively large number of parents from the "baby boom" generation, who temporarily produce a somewhat larger number of births - despite the fact that each of them on average has only 1.36 children, which is far below the reproductive level of about 2.1 children per woman
It's a tough bind. Obviously a weak labour market does not take well to high net immigration of largely lower skilled workers, not to even get into the difficulty Germany has had integrating immigrants into mainstream German culture (a faily serious problem in many continental European nations). But, slowing down immigration is a death wish, even if the German people were accepting of a drastic cut in pension benefits and an older retirement age.
You're right, something is very wrong with this picture. Reform should have been taken up seriously a very long time ago. The demographics have been trending this way for decades.
Do you realize how often this article has been reivised, and how outdated it is again?
Given the lack of WMD in Iraq, the lack of evidence tying Saddam to the September 11th attacks, and the lack of any proof that Saddam had worked with the Al Qaeda terrorist organization, the Bush administration is trying to switch the rational of the Iraq war to "spreading democracy." Again, the facts on the ground do not support this assertion. In June 2003 Paul Bremer unilaterally canceled the request from the Iraqis to hold local elections. [59] Not surprisingly, this administration has also discussed disbanding the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). In the harsh reality of oil and geostrategy, the US probably does not want a real democracy in Iraq for the same reasons that the CIA and British overthrew Iran's fledgling democracy in 1953. In order to understand why the U.S. does not promote democracies in the oil producing states of the Persian Gulf, I recommend that others read All the Shah's Men by Stephen Kinzer. [60] There are lessons to learn from what happened in Iran fifty years ago.
The elections happened. The 23 autocratic governments of the Arab league are now only 22. If things play out well in Lebanon it will be 21 in a few months. This is a historical event of enormous proportions. Seriously, review the election in Iraq, you can't maintain the same level of cynicism before and after that event.
Though you really have to listen to a couple of months worth of shows to get into the swing of things, and sometimes it takes that long to develop an argument.
This is why the idea that we invaded Iraq to steal the oil (and sundry variations on this theme) is so absurd. We stand to make far more money by buying Iraqi oil than by just walking in and taking it.
Yeah exactly. It goes deeper than that though. If the US and Britian really had no moral compunction about doing anything for oil, why wouldn't they have simply cut a deal with Saddam, locking in long-term contracts at high prices (for the early naughts) of around $30 a barrel?
Iraq's oil is being traded on the open market now, it's not like the US is in control of where it goes. Though I'll give my original interlocutor credit for having a more nuanced argument than that the "no blood for oil" folks, flawed though still it be.
You're correct that there has been a modest move towards more balanced holdings particularly in China and Japan, especially over the period when the dollar was falling. This is probably positive as it reduces the risk of global over-exposure to a single currency. Heading into Q2 2005 we are seeing the dollar recover precisely as a preferred store of value (though it probably could stand to fall a bit further). Chinese currency revaluation will be the biggest news in currency markets this summer, and we're probably in for a wild ride.
The dollar has been steadily improving since mid-March, when it hit a recent low against the euro, Japanese yen and other currencies. The gains have come despite some recent economic data that normally would have sent the dollar reeling. That suggests the currency is experiencing a growing vote of confidence from investors in the USA and abroad.
Last week, the government said the U.S. trade deficit widened to another record in February. That's a development that usually would have been considered negative for the dollar because it means the USA has to attract more foreign capital to finance the economy. But the dollar rose instead.
...investors are focusing more on factors supporting the dollar, such as the outlook for higher U.S. interest rates, rather than other issues that have put pressure on the currency.
The federal budget deficit came in at $412 billion, or 3.6% of GDP, last year and could be about the same level this year. Recent budget deficits are a record in dollar terms; as a percentage of the economy, they are below the levels of the Reagan years.
In the above post I erroneously say that France was the largest military supplier to Iraq. The USSR actually was the leader in total sales between 1973 and 1990. France was the second overall, and shares the top 5 with former Warsaw Pact countries. France's total arms sales to Iraq were most vigorous in the eighties.
I find that hard to believe, but I apologize for what some might consider an ad hominem attack. All attempts at humor aside.
No it's not. The logical chain of events that would precede that goes as follows:
1) Countries start accepting an alternative currency for oil, such as the euro. 2) Other countries start purchasing oil in those currencies where it's appropriate 3) Those countries no longer need to keep a reserve of USD, so they maintain it less as they become more comfortable in the new business relationship 4) As time progresses, more countries become a party to the new trading relationship and thus also become less motivated to trade for USD 5) As the number hoarding USD becomes less and less, there are fewer places to spend that currency. 6) The US dollars start coming home like so many bad cheques.
You're assuming that capital markets see the Euro as a safe currency to store capital in. I believe that many of the points I made earlier show why it's not, and why private capital markets and independent nations choose to purchase US treasuries at ridiculously low rates of return in preference to other sovereigns. It's one thing to focus on the currency that is used to purchase a certain commodity, but ignoring the massive preference for US treasuries is not good for your argument.
Basically your argument depends on a viable alternative currency. Not just among oil exporting nations (there isn't), but in global capital markets. The sad fact of the matter is that the euro area is not strong enough to offer an alternative currency. Save for Britain, northern Europe, and the nations that are liberalizing their economies in the east (the non-euro countries), Europe hasn't been doing so hot lately. The latest polls show France looks set to reject the EU constitution. The ECB has led Germany's economy to near ruin through it's inflexible policy of focussing on inflation targets and ignoring general economic growth and unemployment. The center-price economic policy of the euro-zone , the stability and growth pact, has all but been abandoned after several years of France and Germany completely violating it.
Hey, Europe is trying some interesting things, and no doubt, the whole continent has benefitted enormously from the EU's trade liberalization, harmonization of regulation, privatization, and anti-trust legislation. But you have to realize that we are in the very very early stages of this experiment. It hasn't proven its stability. Sovereign governments do not bet on a horizon of a few years when making investments in reserve currency, they bet on several decades. The euro has existed for 3 years. I really do hope that the world will develop more than one reliable currency some day, but there won't be any serious flight away from the dollar for a while. The plans of a brutal dictator notwithstanding.
The last country that tried to accept non US currency for oil got bombed and invaded, so no, we're not seeing that happening.
I'm not going to touch this other than to say that there are a lot of good, moral reasons, and legitimately humanitarian reasons for why the war was supported. You don't have to agree that those reasons were enough to cause a way, but it's disingenuous to pretend that there was a single point of causality in such a complex event.
Yes. If the US hadn't invaded, I would say it's pretty much a certainty that Iraq would take Euros instead of food, and that many european nations would take oil for Euros. Are you seriously suggesting that this wouldn't have occurred?
No, I didn't attribute any altruistic motives to him at all.. I believe I referred to him as a brutal dictator. His motives aren't relevant.
I wonder if you would have held your nose in disgust at the beneficiaries of this scheme if things had played out this way. You're suggesting that France (I'll single them out as the largest importer of Iraq oil, largest military s
Repeat after me: Indymedia is not a source of respectable economic research.
Your arguments are big on grand sweeping statements but short on details and evidence. I'm afraid you're playing your hand as someone who has not looked deeply into competing explanations for what is going on. Seriously, can you point to any large-scale flight to safety from US treasuries to other currencies or assets? It just isn't realistically happening. Do you really think that some scheme cooked up by Chirac and Hussein to sell Iraqs meager oil output in Euros would have been likely? Do you honestly think that this fairly insignificant move would cause the trillions of dollars in treasuries held as a reserve currency to be liquidated in favor of Euros? Do you have any idea how momentous that move would be, and how massive events that have triggered a change in global reserve currency have been in the past? Are you actually suggesting that Saddam Hussein had a great beneficient financial program for the world?
Occam's Razor my friend, look into it.
Some sort of Baran-Wallerstein type theory of global immiserization is not "an accepted fact" as you claim, but actually widely discredited. Because post-war Germany and Japan, South Korea, Canada, all the greatest trading partners of the US are not 'exploited'. I'm sorry, you lose, move away from the table.
Look, I can tell that you're not going to be convinced by anything anyone says about this that doesn't fit your world-view, but I'm going to give a simple analogy for anyone who might stumble across this discussion. If you buy stuff from me, I prosper more than if you don't. If I am Germany, and I have stuff for sale then I am better off if people buy my stuff. If no one offers to buy it, then I have less money to spend on things I need. It would hurt me, as Germany a great deal if suddenly the US started trading with me less. OK, that's not too hard to understand.
Yes it would be good if Japan was also buying more Japanese goods and services and Germany more German goods and services. It would also be nice if Japan's banks weren't supporting billions upon billions of bad debt, and if German firms weren't regulated out of hiring new employees in defference to those who already have jobs. Having high exports, built on the back of American sovereign and consumer debt hasn't made these problems worse, but it may have forestalled their domestic resolution. It certainly isn't good for the long-term in America to have such high debt and low savings, but that's the price you've got to pay when you're basically supporting the world's economy. The alternative of allwoing Japan and Germany to sink into depression is too harsh for everyone.
BTW, I don't live in the US, not that I see what difference that makes, I thought we were discussing ideas here.
Explain to me how this makes the US a "nice guy"? Where I come from, we call that "ripping everyone off".
I'll take a stab at this. Domestic demand in Europe and Japan is stagnating, Japan has been in and our of deflation for over a decade, Germany is toying with it. Germany is facing 12.6% unemployment right now the highest numbers since the thirties. Europe can't escape the massive future liabilities the government has amassed due to its low birth rates, and therefore has to import as much labour as it can simply to keep going. The threat of low-cost labour from the rest of the EU, and the curtailing of benefits that have come to be seen as a right threaten to harm the social structures of Europe in irreperable ways.
You've been paying attention only to people who say what you want if you really believe that there has ever been any chance of the Euro becoming a reserve currency in the world economy. Ireland even began issuing some of it's sovereign debt in USD a few weeks ago! Extrapolating this assertion and saying this was the reason for the Iraq war borders on voluntary lunacy. The US trade deficit has been nearly the only thing that has kept Europe and Asia from operating in a severe recession over the last few years.
Basically America's consumer, partially aided by the Fed's policy of low interest rates, has been supporting the world's economy. Economists have been wringing thier hands for years over how the world economy is running on only one engine. Part of the hope was that during this period Europe (really talking about Germany here, the largest economy in Europe by far) and Japan would reform thier labour laws, and banking system respectively, creating domestic growth and genuine domestic demand, and start to buy stuff not only from themselves, supporting thier own economies, but also from America.
Aside from the fact that the social structures of Japan and Germany, as well as the government leaders have pretty much failed to address the structural problems that have brought their domestic economies to thier knees while they had a chance. The consequences of this so far have been a falling US dollar, but could easily be protectionism, which is really unfortunate.
But that's just what I've grokked over the last few years. I could be wrong. But I doubt I'm more wrong than you in this case.
Our site is being travelled almost exclusively by Firefox users and we are getting a consistent 0.9% clickthrough rate, which is double the average rate the article quotes for IE.
Maybe it's just that the average site doesn't offer the people anything as compelling as an egg timer that integrates with their web browser.;-)
> Where does their improved standard of living come from?
Being paid or rewarded for possessing the rare skill of being able to manage others? Having more experience than thier know-it-all employees? Working harder to move forward in their carreers?
Unless your employers have guns pointed at you, exploitation is pretty much a fantasy. You might need to be a Marxist to know what "surplus value" means, but you've got to be a non-Marxist to understand what it means.
Basically the only reason he didn't get to kill many Kurds during this period was that the US was basically at war with Iraq during the entire period and prevented the Baathists from operating in Kurdish territory. Which incidentally, is why the Bush boys are actually viewed as liberators in at least the northern part of Iraq.
Sure would have been nice if the US had achieved that level of autonomy for the Shi'ites back in 1991 too, but instead Saddam killed hundreds of thousands of them. Leaving him in power for that period was a mistake.
Like dirty dishes, waiting 13 years to finish a war is way harder than doing it early on. The longer the problem festered the worse the resolution was bound to be. But either way, the destinies of Iraq and the US were intertwined.
Slashdot Mirror
Sxipper just came out today in beta, it looks interesting. Sort of like a much nicer roboform with OpenID support baked in, and collaborative form mapping (and for firefox of course). Check it out.
And the last two decades have seen the installation of a lot of judges whose philosophies are decidedly pro-business with a jaundiced eye for monopoly regulation, as well as a large number of legislators and at least two Presidents, even three as Clinton wasn't exactly a flaming socialist, turning a blind eye and a curious lack of oversight as the Baby Bells merged together again.
I'm not going to address your other points as others have already carried on the discussion (notably RevMike) below. But I will take umbrage with your implication that if Clinton was a 'flaming socialist' [sic] the Bells may be serving the public better today than they now are.
When was the last time you lived in a legitimately socialist country and tried to get services from the state telecom provider? If Clinton was a flaming socialist the situation today would likely be much closer to the dark days of Ma Bell than it is today. Or are you forgetting that it was the administration of that flaming capitalist Reagan that oversaw the initial breakup of the state-sanctioned Bell monopoly. Or that the strongest defense of the end-to-end principle from within government was presented by Michael Powell?
A capitalist would resist regulatory frameworks that benefit private interests at the expense of the market; private interest regulation tends to thrive under flaming socialists--witness the longstanding telecom monopoly in recovering-from-socialism Mexico where using VOIP over the telecom's network is techincally against the law. In practice, and pretty much in practical theory, socialism tends towards being indistinguishable from mercantilism.
I think the US is a sinking ship and we would all be best served by attempting to dissociate from them before they drag us with them to the bottom.
Your post is long on invective and broad statements, but short on reason and details. Who praytell is set to dominate world economics, innovation, research, higher education, etc. etc.. Seriously, it's one thing for you to sit around in your office and spout off such drivel, but have you taken a look at bond yeilds, FDI flows, foriegn investment in US real estate, etc? Smart money is betting on America; it's still the destination of choice when there is a flight to safety.
> Since when are Democrats "the most liberal of parties"? What about socialists?
You can't be seriously so out of touch with political discourse to think liberalism, at any point along it's centuries of history, let alone as a whole tradition has anything to do with socialism. Socialists are anti-liberal almost by definition.
Hit the books young man!
I know I'm coming into this thread late, but you've completely piqued my interest with this concept. Please take the earlier considerations to heart and consider the options. This is such a great idea.
I find it extremely humorous that the same network that delivers Fox News also delivers 'The Simpsons', 'Family Guy', and that new show about the CIA Dad, with the Extra-Terrestrial live-in etc...
Don't forget that HarperCollins, another subsidiary of News Corp., publishes Michael Moore. Yeah, that Murdoch is all about brainwashing a strident right-wing agenda alright. Either that or he just wants to sell books and make money as much as Moore does.
From another 1998 article in the Economist.
Also check out this chart from a 1998 (!) economist article.
Those were fairly good years for the German economy. Can you see the structural problems between the lines?
How does that make sense?
Ask the Bundesrat.
The labor market in Germany is currently structured in such a way so as to discourage employers from hiring workers. The value of the amount of labor they can get by adding an employee in many cases is much smaller than the cost of doing so, especially given the long-term risk, since it's very difficult to legally lay off employees if a firm goes south. The problem is a big one that may persist for some time as the country re-organizes its social structures, but it is being felt heavily in the short term.
The long-term problem is that Germany needs to, over the long term, bring in foreign workers to maintain it's population, to continue to fund the very expensive social programs and government pensions. It shouldn't surprise you that Germany has a severe baby boomer problem as a result of WWII. But the effects of the demographic bulge have been made much worse as the German birthrate has sunk. Check out this animation
It's a tough bind. Obviously a weak labour market does not take well to high net immigration of largely lower skilled workers, not to even get into the difficulty Germany has had integrating immigrants into mainstream German culture (a faily serious problem in many continental European nations). But, slowing down immigration is a death wish, even if the German people were accepting of a drastic cut in pension benefits and an older retirement age.
You're right, something is very wrong with this picture. Reform should have been taken up seriously a very long time ago. The demographics have been trending this way for decades.
Go for it!
Actually, I don't see why I'm not flogging the blog too. It would be cool to break double-digit readership.
http://newworldman.org/
Do you realize how often this article has been reivised, and how outdated it is again?
Given the lack of WMD in Iraq, the lack of evidence tying Saddam to the September 11th attacks, and the lack of any proof that Saddam had worked with the Al Qaeda terrorist organization, the Bush administration is trying to switch the rational of the Iraq war to "spreading democracy." Again, the facts on the ground do not support this assertion. In June 2003 Paul Bremer unilaterally canceled the request from the Iraqis to hold local elections. [59] Not surprisingly, this administration has also discussed disbanding the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA). In the harsh reality of oil and geostrategy, the US probably does not want a real democracy in Iraq for the same reasons that the CIA and British overthrew Iran's fledgling democracy in 1953. In order to understand why the U.S. does not promote democracies in the oil producing states of the Persian Gulf, I recommend that others read All the Shah's Men by Stephen Kinzer. [60] There are lessons to learn from what happened in Iran fifty years ago.
The elections happened. The 23 autocratic governments of the Arab league are now only 22. If things play out well in Lebanon it will be 21 in a few months. This is a historical event of enormous proportions. Seriously, review the election in Iraq, you can't maintain the same level of cynicism before and after that event.
You'd probably enjoy this radio show
http://www.kwaves.com/roger_archives.htm
Though you really have to listen to a couple of months worth of shows to get into the swing of things, and sometimes it takes that long to develop an argument.
This is why the idea that we invaded Iraq to steal the oil (and sundry variations on this theme) is so absurd. We stand to make far more money by buying Iraqi oil than by just walking in and taking it.
Yeah exactly. It goes deeper than that though. If the US and Britian really had no moral compunction about doing anything for oil, why wouldn't they have simply cut a deal with Saddam, locking in long-term contracts at high prices (for the early naughts) of around $30 a barrel?
Iraq's oil is being traded on the open market now, it's not like the US is in control of where it goes. Though I'll give my original interlocutor credit for having a more nuanced argument than that the "no blood for oil" folks, flawed though still it be.
Wealth is a pie factory.
That's gold by the way.
From yesterday's USAToday:
I know, but every now and then you've got to put the effort in for the sake of the innocent.
In the above post I erroneously say that France was the largest military supplier to Iraq. The USSR actually was the leader in total sales between 1973 and 1990. France was the second overall, and shares the top 5 with former Warsaw Pact countries. France's total arms sales to Iraq were most vigorous in the eighties.
Reference: here!
I apologize for this error.
A quick note to apologize for all the typos in the above post. It's late here.
> The center-price economic policy
Should be center-piece
There's a pile of other typos and gramaical errors. Sorry folks, not my best ofrm, hope you can ignore that and go for the meat.
What is Indymedia? Never heard of it.
I find that hard to believe, but I apologize for what some might consider an ad hominem attack. All attempts at humor aside.
No it's not. The logical chain of events that would precede that goes as follows:
1) Countries start accepting an alternative currency for oil, such as the euro. 2) Other countries start purchasing oil in those currencies where it's appropriate 3) Those countries no longer need to keep a reserve of USD, so they maintain it less as they become more comfortable in the new business relationship 4) As time progresses, more countries become a party to the new trading relationship and thus also become less motivated to trade for USD 5) As the number hoarding USD becomes less and less, there are fewer places to spend that currency. 6) The US dollars start coming home like so many bad cheques.
You're assuming that capital markets see the Euro as a safe currency to store capital in. I believe that many of the points I made earlier show why it's not, and why private capital markets and independent nations choose to purchase US treasuries at ridiculously low rates of return in preference to other sovereigns. It's one thing to focus on the currency that is used to purchase a certain commodity, but ignoring the massive preference for US treasuries is not good for your argument.
Basically your argument depends on a viable alternative currency. Not just among oil exporting nations (there isn't), but in global capital markets. The sad fact of the matter is that the euro area is not strong enough to offer an alternative currency. Save for Britain, northern Europe, and the nations that are liberalizing their economies in the east (the non-euro countries), Europe hasn't been doing so hot lately. The latest polls show France looks set to reject the EU constitution. The ECB has led Germany's economy to near ruin through it's inflexible policy of focussing on inflation targets and ignoring general economic growth and unemployment. The center-price economic policy of the euro-zone , the stability and growth pact, has all but been abandoned after several years of France and Germany completely violating it.
Hey, Europe is trying some interesting things, and no doubt, the whole continent has benefitted enormously from the EU's trade liberalization, harmonization of regulation, privatization, and anti-trust legislation. But you have to realize that we are in the very very early stages of this experiment. It hasn't proven its stability. Sovereign governments do not bet on a horizon of a few years when making investments in reserve currency, they bet on several decades. The euro has existed for 3 years. I really do hope that the world will develop more than one reliable currency some day, but there won't be any serious flight away from the dollar for a while. The plans of a brutal dictator notwithstanding.
The last country that tried to accept non US currency for oil got bombed and invaded, so no, we're not seeing that happening.
I'm not going to touch this other than to say that there are a lot of good, moral reasons, and legitimately humanitarian reasons for why the war was supported. You don't have to agree that those reasons were enough to cause a way, but it's disingenuous to pretend that there was a single point of causality in such a complex event.
Yes. If the US hadn't invaded, I would say it's pretty much a certainty that Iraq would take Euros instead of food, and that many european nations would take oil for Euros. Are you seriously suggesting that this wouldn't have occurred?
No, I didn't attribute any altruistic motives to him at all.. I believe I referred to him as a brutal dictator. His motives aren't relevant.
I wonder if you would have held your nose in disgust at the beneficiaries of this scheme if things had played out this way. You're suggesting that France (I'll single them out as the largest importer of Iraq oil, largest military s
Repeat after me: Indymedia is not a source of respectable economic research.
Your arguments are big on grand sweeping statements but short on details and evidence. I'm afraid you're playing your hand as someone who has not looked deeply into competing explanations for what is going on. Seriously, can you point to any large-scale flight to safety from US treasuries to other currencies or assets? It just isn't realistically happening. Do you really think that some scheme cooked up by Chirac and Hussein to sell Iraqs meager oil output in Euros would have been likely? Do you honestly think that this fairly insignificant move would cause the trillions of dollars in treasuries held as a reserve currency to be liquidated in favor of Euros? Do you have any idea how momentous that move would be, and how massive events that have triggered a change in global reserve currency have been in the past? Are you actually suggesting that Saddam Hussein had a great beneficient financial program for the world?
Occam's Razor my friend, look into it.
Some sort of Baran-Wallerstein type theory of global immiserization is not "an accepted fact" as you claim, but actually widely discredited. Because post-war Germany and Japan, South Korea, Canada, all the greatest trading partners of the US are not 'exploited'. I'm sorry, you lose, move away from the table.
Look, I can tell that you're not going to be convinced by anything anyone says about this that doesn't fit your world-view, but I'm going to give a simple analogy for anyone who might stumble across this discussion. If you buy stuff from me, I prosper more than if you don't. If I am Germany, and I have stuff for sale then I am better off if people buy my stuff. If no one offers to buy it, then I have less money to spend on things I need. It would hurt me, as Germany a great deal if suddenly the US started trading with me less. OK, that's not too hard to understand.
Yes it would be good if Japan was also buying more Japanese goods and services and Germany more German goods and services. It would also be nice if Japan's banks weren't supporting billions upon billions of bad debt, and if German firms weren't regulated out of hiring new employees in defference to those who already have jobs. Having high exports, built on the back of American sovereign and consumer debt hasn't made these problems worse, but it may have forestalled their domestic resolution. It certainly isn't good for the long-term in America to have such high debt and low savings, but that's the price you've got to pay when you're basically supporting the world's economy. The alternative of allwoing Japan and Germany to sink into depression is too harsh for everyone.
BTW, I don't live in the US, not that I see what difference that makes, I thought we were discussing ideas here.
Explain to me how this makes the US a "nice guy"? Where I come from, we call that "ripping everyone off".
I'll take a stab at this. Domestic demand in Europe and Japan is stagnating, Japan has been in and our of deflation for over a decade, Germany is toying with it. Germany is facing 12.6% unemployment right now the highest numbers since the thirties. Europe can't escape the massive future liabilities the government has amassed due to its low birth rates, and therefore has to import as much labour as it can simply to keep going. The threat of low-cost labour from the rest of the EU, and the curtailing of benefits that have come to be seen as a right threaten to harm the social structures of Europe in irreperable ways.
You've been paying attention only to people who say what you want if you really believe that there has ever been any chance of the Euro becoming a reserve currency in the world economy. Ireland even began issuing some of it's sovereign debt in USD a few weeks ago! Extrapolating this assertion and saying this was the reason for the Iraq war borders on voluntary lunacy. The US trade deficit has been nearly the only thing that has kept Europe and Asia from operating in a severe recession over the last few years.
Basically America's consumer, partially aided by the Fed's policy of low interest rates, has been supporting the world's economy. Economists have been wringing thier hands for years over how the world economy is running on only one engine. Part of the hope was that during this period Europe (really talking about Germany here, the largest economy in Europe by far) and Japan would reform thier labour laws, and banking system respectively, creating domestic growth and genuine domestic demand, and start to buy stuff not only from themselves, supporting thier own economies, but also from America.
Aside from the fact that the social structures of Japan and Germany, as well as the government leaders have pretty much failed to address the structural problems that have brought their domestic economies to thier knees while they had a chance. The consequences of this so far have been a falling US dollar, but could easily be protectionism, which is really unfortunate.
But that's just what I've grokked over the last few years. I could be wrong. But I doubt I'm more wrong than you in this case.
Kalin
hey moderators, mod parent up. the grandparent poster was completely ignorant of what he was talking about.
Our site is being travelled almost exclusively by Firefox users and we are getting a consistent 0.9% clickthrough rate, which is double the average rate the article quotes for IE.
Maybe it's just that the average site doesn't offer the people anything as compelling as an egg timer that integrates with their web browser. ;-)
> Where does their improved standard of living come from?
Being paid or rewarded for possessing the rare skill of being able to manage others? Having more experience than thier know-it-all employees? Working harder to move forward in their carreers?
Unless your employers have guns pointed at you, exploitation is pretty much a fantasy. You might need to be a Marxist to know what "surplus value" means, but you've got to be a non-Marxist to understand what it means.
> How many Kurds has he gassed since 1991
Basically the only reason he didn't get to kill many Kurds during this period was that the US was basically at war with Iraq during the entire period and prevented the Baathists from operating in Kurdish territory. Which incidentally, is why the Bush boys are actually viewed as liberators in at least the northern part of Iraq.
Sure would have been nice if the US had achieved that level of autonomy for the Shi'ites back in 1991 too, but instead Saddam killed hundreds of thousands of them. Leaving him in power for that period was a mistake.
Like dirty dishes, waiting 13 years to finish a war is way harder than doing it early on. The longer the problem festered the worse the resolution was bound to be. But either way, the destinies of Iraq and the US were intertwined.