US relaxes visa rules for foreign scholars

The Financial Times says that US relaxes visa rules for foreign scholars because

Academics and business leaders have warned that the US risked losing its position as the top destination for promising international students with its onerous visa process. Microsoft's Bill Gates and General Electric's Jeffrey Immelt have added their voices to warnings that tighter visa controls introduced after the September 11 attacks were harming the US's economic interests.

Emphasis Mine

The hegemonic power of the USA relies upon its technological and scientific supremency.

John W. Steadman of the IEEE-USA was more forthright in his letter to the US Congress, Re: S. 1635, the L-1 (Intra-Company Transferee) Visa Reform Act of 17 September 2004,

We agree that it is contrary to the long-term competitiveness of the United States to train the world’s best and brightest in cutting edge science and engineering disciplines and then send them home with taxpayer subsidized knowledge and skill to compete against U.S. companies. But giving foreign graduates of U.S. educational programs a temporary work visa doesn’t resolve this problem, it just postpones it while they acquire even more valuable experience and business contacts. A better approach would be to improve the nation’s permanent immigration system and put talented students on a fast track to U.S. citizenship, instead of consigning them to second-class status on a temporary work visa.

What is so amazing about this is that the US educational system is in decay due to the encroachments of the Religious Right through the suppression of the teaching of evolution and liberal ideas. Indeed, this change to the visa rules is only a temporary fix while the US educational system decays into obsolence.

This would be a contradiction within the capitalist system. Education is needed to maintain the technological and scientific lead but education must be suppressed to maintain control of the population. So what the US ruling class wants is a imagitative, unthinking drone.

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Corporate Profits: Breaking records

Capitalists are grabbing a rising share of national income at the expense of workers says Corporate Profits: Breaking records in The Economist. The accompanying graph shows the company profit share for the G7 to be 14% of GDP in 2004 - up from 10% in the earlier 1980's. The article says this is the highest in 75 years.

...Over the past three years American corporate profits have risen by 60%, wage income by only 10%.

While this is good for capitalists in the short term (because they are getting a greater ROI), the longer term picture is not so good because the proportion of GDP available to purchase goods is less. Currently consumers are either using savings or borrowings to maintain their consumption patterns in the face of declining real wages. Eventually this source of extra income will be exhausted. The consumers are gambling that real income will rise in the long term, or that asset appreciation will be faster than inflation to be converted into income to cover the accumulated debt.

If the share of wages in GDP continues to slide, there could be a backlash from workers who feel short-changed. Yet the chances of this are lower than before. The old divide between “them” and “us” is becoming blurred: many workers also own shares directly or through pension funds, which sooner or later will give them a slice of profits. In any case, there are good reasons to believe that profits growth will soon slow sharply and that workers will make up some of their lost ground.

Emphasis Mine

This is the fallacy of the Ownership Society - decreasing wages is compensated by increasing dividends. Dividends paid into pension funds are forced savings - they are not current income. Because the capitalists still own the majority of shares, most of the increased dividends will accure to them not to the workers. Thus, the increased dividends will only partially offset the decline in real wages and then only to workers who have accumulated shares through savings. The nett effect to move wealth from the least paid workers to the capitalists with some of this wealth being diverted to the higher waged workers.

...History suggests [that it] is normal for the share of profits in national income to rise during the early stages of a technological revolution, but then those extra profits tend to be competed away. ...

... However, there is another factor that might have raised the return on capital relative to labour in a lasting way, namely the integration of China and India into the world economy, along with their vast supply of cheap labour. To the extent that this increases the global ratio of labour to capital, it will lift the relative return to capital. ...

What this means is that consumption will grow in China and India because of the increased wages earned there and will decline in the West as jobs are out-sourced there. This will power the GDP of China and India even further through investment and wages. Conversely, the reverse will happen in the West.

Previous economic booms were powered by cheap labour moving to the factories. Now, factories are moving to where the cheap labour is.

The article ends with a warning about a sharemarket collapse because the shares are overvalued in anticipation of continued ROI at current levels.

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Picking out the hayseeds

Mickey Z challenges us to Pick out the hayseeds:

Moral: When all they feed us is horse shit...it’s up to us to find the hayseeds that enable us to not only survive, but to thrive.

Questions: What hayseeds have you picked out?

My answer would be that

• There are a lot of thoughtful people out there;
• There are people seeking the truth no matter how much is dumped on them;
• They continue to state their beliefs in face of grave personal attacks;
• Non-violent solutions are better than violent ones

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How Dirty Harry Turned Commie

I picked this piece up via Cursor.

Frank Rich writes in How Dirty Harry Turned Commie

... Rush Limbaugh used his radio megaphone to inveigh against the "liberal propaganda" of "Million Dollar Baby," in which Mr. Eastwood plays a crusty old fight trainer who takes on a fledgling "girl" boxer (Hilary Swank) desperate to be a champ. Mr. Limbaugh charged that the film was a subversively encoded endorsement of euthanasia, and the usual gang of ayotallahs chimed in. ...

"What do you have to give these people to make them happy?" Mr. Eastwood asked when I phoned to get his reaction to his new status as a radical leftist. He is baffled that those "who expound from the right on American values" could reject a movie about a heroine who is "willing to pull herself up by the bootstraps, to work hard and persevere no matter what" to realize her dream. "That all sounds like Americana to me, like something out of Wendell Willkie," he says. "And the villains in the movie include people who are participating in welfare fraud."

What Clint Eastwood has not realised yet is that American Values now include blind obedience to power, and unquestioning support for whatever crimes are committed by the government. These "values" were not in the movie so Mr. Eastwood is now anti-American.

... My own experience is that knowing the ultimate direction of "Million Dollar Baby" - an organic development that in no way resembles a plot trick like that in "The Sixth Sense" - only deepened my second viewing of it.

Here is what so scandalously intrudes in the final third of Mr. Eastwood's movie: real life. A character we love - and we love all three principals, including the narrator, an old boxing hand played by Morgan Freeman - ends up in the hospital with a spinal-cord injury and wants to die. Whether that wish will be granted, and if so, how, is the question that confronts not just the leading characters but also a young and orthodox Roman Catholic priest (Brian F. O'Byrne). The script, adapted by Paul Haggis from stories by F. X. Toole, has a resolution, as it must. But the movie has a powerful afterlife precisely because it is not an endorsement of any position on assisted suicide - or, for that matter, of any position on the disabled, as some disability-rights advocates have charged in a separate protest. ...

Emphasis Mine

This is another view on what I commented on earlier in Piss on Pity. What worries me is the comment above - an organic development. Maybe for a fully-abled person, to have a disability means that it is natural for them to wish to die. It is not disability that causes these thoughts of suicide - it is the callousness of other fully-abled people that drives one to this end. This intolerance for imperfection (in thought, in deed, in appearance, in body) feeds off the insecurity of those pursuing it. These people resent every breath one takes, every sip one drinks, every morsel one eats - it is as if one is taking directly from their mouths. They think that if there were no imperfect people, then the world would be perfect.

Having read this other opinion about the movie, I am going yo have to see the movie and make up my own mind.

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Mission Impossible

The US cannot leave Iraq. Either the USA or Iraq must be annihlated. There is no middle ground. Al-Sistani can flex all of his political muscle but the USA cannot leave Iraq. The insurgency can only win by killing every last GI.

George W. Bush has bet the entire future of the USA on the war in Iraq. Victory there means another ten (10) to twenty (20) years of imperial dominance. Defeat means castrophe.

The credibility of the US ruling class is at stake. This is why only two (2) pro-war candidates were running in the last presidental election. Loss of credibility means loss of control. Oil would be priced in Euros and the PRC will float the Yuan. Economic collapse for the US would ensue with some effect for the rest of the world. The world economy might take one (1) to two (2) years to adjust itself to the removal of the US economy but I think it is possible.

The main worry is, of course, all of those nuclear weapons in the hands of a failed state (USA)!

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Dialogue Not Warfare

I found out about Judge Hamoud al-Hitar via Mind Over Militants

The story is simple. In Yemen, a smart young judge named Hamoud al-Hitar challenged some captured, yet defiant Al Qaeda members to theological duel; a debate about the Koran in a winner-take-all contest aimed at convincing the prisoners they were misinterpreting Islam.

"If you can convince us that your ideas are justified by the Koran, then we will join you in your struggle," Hitar told the militants. "But if we succeed in convincing you of our ideas, then you must agree to renounce violence." The prisoners agreed to the challenge.

Judge Hitar was warned off the project by “western antiterrorism experts,” and he had some doubts of his own but in the “hope of bringing peace to his troubled homeland” the cleric went ahead with astonishing results.

The Yemen Times says The Dialogue Committee is known internationally

The Dialogue Committee aims at steering extremists away from violence and accepting tolerance and people living together in peace. A militant is released if persuaded after going through a number of sessions of dialogue.

Last month, the Yemeni government released 113 detainees allegedly being a part of the Al-Qaeda international terrorist network, including at least five who were accused of being involved in the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000.

Meanwhile, the US Senate has approved the appointment of the Torturer-in-Chief as Attorney-General. The hubris of the USA is amazing. All that technology in the military blinds them to simple techniques such as Judge Hamoud al-Hitar and his committee. The American (and Israeli) way creates martyrs while the Yemeni way creates citizens.

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North Korea is Safe For a While

North Korea has made the following announcement:

We had already taken the resolute action of pulling out of the NPT and have manufactured nukes for self-defence to cope with the Bush administration's evermore undisguised policy to isolate and stifle the DPRK.

Emphasis Mine

Confrontation breeds confrontation. The U.S. ruling class has run out of reasons for it to control the world: bar one - it controls the world's most powerful military - for the time being at least.

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4GW and Police Work

I have come to the conclusion that Fourth Generation Warfare (4GW) is simply police work. Third Generation Warfare (3GW) aimed to convince people who owned assets to obey your orders. 4GW aims to do the same with people who have no assets. In other words, normal everyday police work.

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You're Biased, I'm Not

This Against the Grain commentary was written by CBSNews.com's Dick Meyer. In You're Biased, I'm Not, Dick Meyer writes:

Bias is the same way. If someone accuses you of being biased, the conversation is over. You're not going to convince them that you're not biased or that they are biased, too. Someone who plays the bias card does not want to understand another perspective even out of curiosity. They just want to hear things they agree with and be able to dismiss all the rest.

When people talk about bias explicitly, they mostly talk about media bias. Thirty years ago, the prevailing theme was a sort of Marxist analysis that all Big Media had an inevitable pro-capitalist, Neanderthal bias. That view shrunk to the margins and the dominant complaint now is that Big Media has a liberal bias, which mostly means pro-Democratic. However, I now get accused of being biased almost as much by the left as the right, but the e-mail from the left is now meaner.

Emphasis Mine

The last sentence has me intrigued because e-mail responses to sites such as Ted Rall and Tom Tomorrow show that the right sends e-mails that are mainly death threats, rape threats, and a series of homophobic references.

The first charge about the Marxist analysis of MSM is a smoke-screen. The reason Dick Meyer gets paid is to promote the interests of his employer. And his employer is interested in the promotion and the furtherence of the Capitalist system. The charge about being Neanderthal is just a red herring.

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Adrian Wooldridge on Al-Qaeda as a Virtual Corporation

Adrian Wooldridge at The Fifth Annual Spring Symposium at the McIntire School of Commerce said:

... I remember in the 1990s reading endlessly books by people like Tom Peters, Thriving on Chaos, about the virtual corporation and the -- corporation, and delayering, and hierarchy, and the importance of networks, and people like Jack Wells, who pay lots of lip service to it. But where that organization has actually materialized is not in, you know, Harvard-educated people running businesses. It's al Qaeda that is the perfect virtual organization. It's an institutional innovation of incredible power. And I think that's one reason why we're not underestimating the importance of terrorism. We're not underestimating the importance of terrorism because the capacity of these people to inflict massive harm is greater than it's ever been, through not just nuclear weapons, but biological weapons, chemical weapons. They just have a capacity to inflict damage on people and on economic systems by the panic it creates. Because the conditions for the spread of this ideology have never been greater, with this massive process of urbanization, with the fact that there are so many young people, young males, as Robert was saying earlier, in poorer parts of the world. And because of the power of global capitalism summons up resentment from people. And that resentment sort of organizes very disparate groups into what looks like a common organization.

Dr. Adrian Wooldridge's biography indicates that he is the Washington correspondent for The Economist.

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Pundits

Prof. Juan Cole says, in Goldberg v. Cole Redux

But Goldberg is just a dime a dozen pundit. Cranky rich people hire sharp-tongued and relatively uninformed young people all the time and put them on the mass media to badmouth the poor, spread bigotry, exalt mindless militarism, promote anti-intellectualism, and ensure generally that rightwing views come to predominate even among people who are harmed by such policies. One of their jobs is to marginalize progressives by smearing them as unreliable.

Amen, Comrade!

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FTA = Virtual Economies?

The US Business & Industry Council posted an article by Kevin L. Kearns and Alan Tonelson, called November Trade Figures Show Record Deficit which complains about the growing US trade deficit and concludes that:

...the problem rests with the NAFTA-style trade agreements signed by Presidents Bush and Clinton. These agreements have failed to boost America's global competitiveness or its living standards. In fact, the huge, rapidly rising manufactures deficit shows that these trade agreements have really been outsourcing agreements. Their aim has been to send production overseas to low-cost countries and keep the U.S. market open to the resulting output, not to boost exports of American-made products. What’s needed now is the stabilizing of America's trade flows, and that will require a completely new approach to U.S. trade policy -- one that puts domestic manufacturing first as opposed to sacrificing it on the altar of free trade theory.

What is going on here is the creation of a virtual economy in which the economic boundaries do not coincide with the political ones. The increasing movement of manufacture and services overseas means that the military commitment must expand to cover this.

The old model of importing of raw materials and the exporting of finished goods and services no longer applies to a single country. The major capitalist countries must increasingly interfere with the political economy of countries where their economic interests are now located. This will cause a collision between the economic overlords and the nationalistic tendencies of the local capitalist class. This will be particularly evident in the former communist super-powers like Russia and China. These have the military might to confront the USA and the EU.

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Class warfare is a dead end

The Liberal Media is at it again. This time, Sydney Morning Herald is decrying the use of Class Warfare in its editorial.

Now Mr Howard can make his last great mark on the economy by abolishing state industrial relations commissions, which cover half the workforce, and unifying the system. He should also revisit the abolition of unfair dismissal laws, which are excessively onerous on the companies that create jobs. Labor screams class warfare whenever such reforms are proposed, and did so again this week. Serfdom for the workers.

But the Howard Government built four victories on greater prosperity for blue-collar workers, who switched parties in large numbers. A more open, less rigid economy which rewards initiative and productivity would mean more, not less, prosperity for workers, whether blue- or white-collared.

What the liberal media means by class warfare is when the workers fight back against the attacks by the bosses. The attacks by the bosses is considered to be the normal operation of the capitalist system.

The prosperity of the system is determined to be the movement of wealth from the poor to the rich - not the overall increase in wealth of the system (that may be a by-product). Anything that interferes with that is class warfare.

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4GW, Al-Qaeda, and Virtual Corporations

The key to understanding the concept of 4GW and Al-Qaeda is that of the Virtual Corporation. As noted in Imperial Hubris and The 9/11 Commission Report, Al-Qaeda has essentially outsourced its operations to independent groups. Al-Qaeda remains the overall planner, financier, and trainer of the Islamic insurgency. However, the main problem is that of quality control as is with all outsourcing arrangements.

In 4GW terms, a similar thing has happened with corporations: their production facilities are now overseas beyond the protection of their country's immediate protection. The assets that are threatened by a 3GW force may well belong to the corporation in the country of that force.

In the 3GW world, the assets of the capitalist class resided mainly in the home country and allied territories. There was a clear delineation between assets of competing capitalist classes. Now, your competitor may well be next to you in a foreign country, or may even share the same production faclities. So the concept of threatening your enemies' assets becomes meaningless.

As the success of the 3GW forces grows, they become less effective because the assets are increasingly controlled by a single capitalist class.

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