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To: Tom Clarke who wrote (1971)	6/16/2001 11:47:34 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 23908

Many thanks for such an exhilarating, thought-provoking paper... I'll get back to it on Monday... Yet I'll make one remark: as usual, the author downplays the purview and the impact elite clubs such as the Bohemian Grove have within society. But that's obviously not the way I see it, I mean, these exclusive lobbies should be viewed as unions. Do you think that the AFL-CIO or the UAW are just a bunch of idle gossipers with no real leverage on society? Gus.

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (1971)	6/18/2001 1:11:32 PM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23908

Re: Meet The Secret Rulers of the World The truth about the Bohemian Grove June 15, 2001 Below is an interesting paper about the alleged "cardinal sin" of the late Soviet Union --the centrally-planned economy.... THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF PLANNING AND THE DEMISE OF THE CENTRALLY-PLANNED ECONOMY Gary Fields Introduction How did an economy of state central planning come to represent the project of twentieth century socialism and why did this project founder? This essay casts its sights in the direction of the past in seeking answers to this question. Fifty years ago E.H. Carr, one of the most influential historians of this century and arguably the world's foremost scholar on the Soviet Union, wrote: "The economic impact of the Soviet Union on the rest of the world may be summed up in the single word, 'planning'" (Carr, 1947: 20). The Soviet planned economy to which Carr referred, was perhaps the most compelling experiment in economic engineering ever attempted. What made this endeavor unique was the fact that the Soviet regime, in establishing institutions for the achievement of planned economic outcomes, virtually eliminated the market and the price system of allocation as the foundation for economic activity. While the prelude for this project is to be found in the economic policy debates of the 1920s in the USSR and the political ascendancy of Josef Stalin in 1928, the ancestry of this project is traceable to the nineteenth-century utopian critique of early European industrialization (Benevolo, 1963: xii; Hall, 1988). Embedded in this critique were the initial stirrings of a merger between the ideals of socialism and the idea of planning. This merger spawned a powerful tradition within the political economy of the socialist movement in which planning represented the means for overcoming a market system seemingly incapable of fulfilling its original Enlightenment promise. For the Soviets, as heirs to this tradition, creation of a planned economy constituted the key policy component for guiding the transition from capitalism to socialism that the Soviet regime believed, rightly or wrongly, was its political mission and historical destiny. With the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991, the planning experiment reached an abrupt and ignominious conclusion. [snip] From: ist-socrates.berkeley.edu Now, I for one would reformulate the last sentence as: "With the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991, the planning experiment reached an abrupt and ironical conclusion... as global capitalism morphed into polycentrally-planned capitalism". Indeed, with the likes of Microsoft, Boeing, Nestle, DaimlerChrysler, GM, Exxon-Mobil, Airbus, Vivendi-Universal, Bechtel, Citigroup, etc. dubbed "corporate Godzillas" by pundit Kenichi Omae (in his last book, The Invisible Continent), world capitalism can no longer claim to be a fair, market-driven process. And the very fact that the powers-that-be do convene on a regular basis (Davos, Bilderberg, European Round Table, Bohemian Grove, etc) shows us that the maintenance of global capitalism needs a coordination of sorts --at the highest corporate/political level.

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (1971)	6/18/2001 1:37:34 PM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23908

Footnote to my previous post: The Godzilla Companies of the New Economy (Page 1 of 3) By Kenichi Ohmae strategy-business.com

To: Tom Clarke who wrote (1971)	6/27/2001 5:54:58 AM
From: GUSTAVE JAEGER	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 23908

Re: Meet The Secret Rulers of the World The truth about the Bohemian Grove June 15, 2001 POWER ELITES IN AMERICA: OLIGOPOLY AND POLITICAL PULL (OR, BEWARE THE REGULATORY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX) By Sam Wells The eighteenth-century Scottish economist Adam Smith maintained that keeping a market free from political meddling benefits consumers and the economy as a whole -- but not necessarily particular business interests. This is why, throughout The Wealth of Nations, we find a deep suspicion of businessmen as a class and especially as members of politically-active special interest groups. Smith wrote: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is impossible indeed to prevent such meetings, by any law which either could be enforceable, or would be consistent with liberty or justice. But though the law cannot hinder people of the same trade from sometimes assembling together, it ought to do nothing to facilitate such assemblies, much less to render them necessary." [snip] laissez-fairerepublic.com