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Pastimes : Kosovo -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (16878)	8/12/2000 8:47:07 AM
From: Tom Clarke	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 17770

US to send troops to fight over diamond mines in Sierra Leone. nypost.com

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (16878)	8/14/2000 6:19:31 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Respond to of 17770

I think the Brits have rather a wall-to-wall fatigue.... The U.K. has sharply declined over the past ten years. For that matter, here's the European GDP Scoreboard: 1. Germany 2. France 3. Italy 4. U.K. 5. Spain My guesstimate is that, in 20 years from now, Europe's Top 5 economies will come as follows: (in 2020) 1. Spain 2. France 3. Italy 4. Germany 5. U.K. I think Spain will greatly benefit from globalization thanks to its South American "beachhead", not to speak of the rising clout of Latinos in the U.S. The recent Lycos-Terra Nueva merger or the choice of Miami by former Telefonica CEO Villalonga to set his company's HQ are just two clues hinting at the predominant role of Spain in the coming years. The other European country that will most benefit from Spain's rise is France. Germany used to thrive in the "Old-Economy" paradigm: heavy machinery, automobile manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, iron and steel, chemicals,.... The misfortunes of German SAP AG and Dutch Baan N.V. show us that Nothern Europe's herd mentality is hampering the development of a Silicon Valley-like environment. Vivendi should grow stronger than Bertelsmann and Infogrames Entert. is already Europe's No1 videogame editor (and the 2nd worldwide after Electronic Arts). France's military industries will help it maintain its No.2 rank, yet, the cold war is over and the trickle-down from military research to civilian applications doesn't seem as crucial as it used to be. Today, it's rather the other way around: the Pentagon is going to Hollywood to pick the cutting-edge ITs.... Furthermore, I expect Italy to thrive better than Germany as well. After all, current economic data about Italy don't account for the country's huge underground economy --it's estimated that Italy's shadow economy accounts for over 20% of its official GDP. Here's an interesting article: informinc.co.uk (The last paragraph might tell you why the Brits have "Blair fatigue") Excerpt: If the programme of returning to small-scale agriculture is based on a backward-looking fantasy, the campaign against big corporations takes on a distinctive flavour in the present. In India farmers' movements have led protectionist campaigns against US agribusiness like Monsanto. These Indian campaigns have been celebrated in the West as popular environmentalism. Indian activist Dr Vandana Shiva has become a potent symbol to Western greens. She argues that Indian tradition holds the means of life to be a common good that cannot be made into private property. This, she argues, is the meaning of the Indian farmers' mobilisations against Monsanto. However, Indian leftist Jairus Banaji takes an altogether more sanguine view of the farmers' movements (see New Farmers' Movements in India, edited by Tom Brass). 'The farmers movements are essentially conservative movements that seek to reinforce the existing property rights', according to Banaji, who notes 'their neglect of, if not active hostility to landless labour' and that 'their anti-modernist ideologies...can sometimes degenerate into fascist rhetoric or "feudal violence"' (pp238-9). Far from treating food as a communal good, farmers are concerned to protect their high prices against cheap foreign imports, no matter what the cost to the landless poor. This programme of protecting indigenous capital is one that binds the farmers to the Hindu nationalist BJP party. The weakness of the environmentalists' anti-corporate campaign is that, while they scold one or two big companies, they end up endorsing the market system at its most backward and parochial. This suggests that, despite their anti-capitalist rhetoric, the real object of their fury lies elsewhere. A century ago, the German socialist August Bebel exposed the limitations of another one-sided and illusory criticism of the market. In his day, the 'predatory' capitalists who were singled out for special treatment were Jews. Responding to the demotic attacks on 'Jewish capitalism', Bebel denounced this as 'the socialism of fools'. Today's socialism of fools is expressed in the anti-corporate rhetoric of the environmental movement. Whatever the environmentalists' intention, upholding such a rural idyll can only serve to justify conservative reaction. In fact the clock is never turned back - that past never existed - but in the here and now resistance to change becomes the norm. Superficially the campaign targets big corporations, but the environmentalists' underlying message is that we should see all creativity and innovation as suspect. Once anti-capitalism was a programme of overturning the social order to build a better one. Today's anti-corporatism aims only to hold the existing society together by protecting the present against the future. Robbed of any ambition towards progressive change, the new socialism of fools reverts to the backward-looking doctrine of romantic conservatism. [snip]