Harvard economist Kenneth Rogoff discusses the dangers of unbridled capitalism, the greed of corporate CEOs and a fundamental problem with the United States economy.

SPIEGEL: Professor Rogoff, the US economy is surging forward, while President Bush celebrates high growth rates. But most Americans believe they are living in a recession. Who is right?
Rogoff: I too have asked myself whether people have gone crazy. But the fact is that the share of wages in total growth is shrinking.

SPIEGEL: In other words, most people are not benefiting from the recovery and are justifiably disappointed?

Rogoff: The working population’s share of national income remained constant for 100 years. That’s why Marx’s theory that only capitalists benefit from capitalism and workers are exploited was completely wrong. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Workers earned more as economies grew.

SPIEGEL: Is this no longer true?

Rogoff: There has been a noticeable decline in the labor factor in all wealthy countries in the past 20 years. The rich are getting richer, but those at the lower end aren’t moving ahead as quickly as the capitalists.

SPIEGEL: So Marx was right after all?

Rogoff: We’re still a long way away from that. Workers are not being exploited. But if their share of growth doesn’t increase, this could be a potential cause of social tension worldwide. The point is that so far attempts to reverse this trend in the US have failed. Boeing employees achieved barely anything by going on strike (editor’s note: last autumn). Instead, the workers are now in a weaker position — both in aviation and in other industries.

SPIEGEL: Meanwhile, corporate CEOs and Wall Street bankers are cashing in on record bonuses.

Rogoff: There has never been a better time to get rich. It’s quite astonishing how much money people make in the hedge fund business and in the private equity field, and how well-off affluent families really are. Given these contradictions, it comes as no surprise that average Americans have a different perception of the economy than (US President) George W. Bush and his friends. They can play around with statistics as much as they want, but it’s clear that we have an unfair distribution of wealth.

SPIEGEL: That hasn’t seemed to bother anyone, as long as the dishwasher-to-millionaire dream still exists.

Rogoff: I tell my children that a man like Bill Gates has a personal fortune of $100 billion. They can’t even comprehend that. Then I explain that he has more money than some countries. If we have these extremes, I can’t understand why we should get rid of the inheritance tax. It hasn’t harmed the economy, and it has evened out the distribution of income across generations.

SPIEGEL: Billion-dollar tax cuts for the super-rich — such as eliminating the inheritance tax — are meant to generate growth for all. Conservatives like to say that a rising tide lifts all boats.

Rogoff: The New Orleans disaster made it painfully clear what happens to people in deep poverty: they don’t even have a boat. Even more tax cuts are the wrong approach, as long as we don’t even have universal health insurance for children. I think that’s outrageous.

SPIEGEL: Are these injustices the price for lower unemployment and strong growth in the United States?

Rogoff: This unbridled capitalism in the United States can’t be sustained socially. It leads to tensions. If we experience another five years like the last five, we will start seeing greater social friction. After all, people aren’t looking at how they’re doing, but rather at how their neighbors are doing and at their own place in society. These huge inequalities are not a particularly desirable characteristic in our society.
spiegel.de

And this guy describes himself as a “Schwartzenegger Republican”.

WASHINGTON (AP) – No limousines or motorcades for Mike Gravel.

Short on campaign cash and barely known, the former Democratic senator from Alaska and his wife, Whitney, took public transportation Monday to a news conference announcing his long-shot bid for president.

Gravel, a 75-year-old self-described maverick, established himself during two terms in the Senate as a critic of the Vietnam War and government secrecy. His campaign will use those themes and a plan to give voters power to make laws.

“Our three branches of government have become like an unstable chair, a three-legged chair,” said Gravel, who left the Senate in 1981 after losing the 1980 Democratic primary. “The founders could not have envisioned how much money and special interests would corrupt the political process. Giving us Americans legislative power will put forth the fourth leg of our stool and make it stable.”

The last time Gravel held elected office Jimmy Carter was in the White House, Saddam Hussein invaded Iran and Post-It notes made their debut. Nearly three decades later, Gravel entered the race focused on doing away with representative democracy, the IRS and income taxes.

He hitched his campaign to an effort that would give all policy decisions to the people through a direct vote, including health care reform, social security investments and declarations of war.

“I believe America is doing harm every day our troops remain in Iraq – harm to ourselves and to the prospects for peace in the world,” Gravel said. “I would remove our troops expeditiously, without contingency. President Bush’s mistake is not worth the life or maiming of more American soldiers.”

His Senate tenure was notable for his anti-war activity. He led a one-man filibuster to protest the Vietnam-era draft, and read into the Congressional Record 4,100 pages of the 7,000-page leaked document known as the Pentagon Papers.
guardian.co.uk

One of the two owners of the DC9 (tail number N900SA) busted at an airport in Ciudad del Carmen in the state of Campeche, Mexico last week freighted 5.5 tons of cocaine had been appointed in 1993 to the Business Advisory Council of the National Republican Congressional Committee by then-Congressional Majority Leader Tom Delay, The MadCowMorningNews can exclusively report.

The plane’s registered owner, “Royal Sons LLC,” a Florida air charter company, was at one time housed in a hanger at the Venice Fl. Airport owned by infamous flight school Huffman Aviation.

Also of major significance is the fact that photos of the DC9, seized last Monday in Ciudad del Carmen, reveal that the plane is painted with the distinctive blue and white color color scheme of official U.S. Government planes.

Moreover, to reinforce the effect, or subterfuge, the plane carries an official-looking Seal painted on its side, which reads: SKY WAY AIRCRAFT, PROTECTION OF AMERICA’S SKIES, around an image of a federal eagle clutching the familiar olive branch in its talons. Many have been fooled into concluding that the plane belongs to the U.S. Transportation Security Administration.

This has obvious and highly serious national security implications, which go well beyond the obvious glee involved in playing political “gotcha” with people caught face-down with their noses buried, Tony Montana-style, in over five tons of cocaine.
madcowprod.com

There is nowhere on this earth quite like Caracas. Certainly the business traveller has no shortage of time to admire the physical beauty of its setting – two-hour traffic jams characterise this oil-boom city, where petrol costs a mere tuppence a litre. We’d better get used to it. For Venezuela has just overtaken Saudi Arabia in its estimated oil reserves to become number one in the world. Venezuela is here to stay.

When the reports of the country’s latest good fortune came through to New York, a banker turned to me and said: “Surely by now George Bush must realise God is not on his side.” Even under the old estimates, Venezuela already had its place as a major oil producer guaranteed for the next 80 years. Now it would appear to stretch into infinity. Together with the Middle East, Caracas will be the major force in world energy markets.

In Venezuela itself, high oil prices are having dramatic effects. The Dallas-like skyline is testament to an economy that grew by an astonishing 18 per cent in 2004 and nearly 10 per cent last year. Oil now accounts for well over 80 per cent of exports and more than 50 per cent of government revenues.
independent.co.uk

Anyone looking to keep up to date with the current talking points for the Venezuelan opposition need only follow the writings of Jackson Diehl in the Washington Post. As deputy editorial page editor, Diehl drafts the un-bylined editorials about President Hugo Chavez.

When Diehl writes a particularly unsubstantiated column, the Post publishes his work on the right-hand side of the opinion page, effectively distancing his rants from the official opinion of the paper.

Over the years, progressive Venezuela watchers have come to regard Jackson Diehl Op-Eds as a sounding board for the urban legends and gossip promoted by Venezuela’s well-connected opposition leaders–sort of a Page Six for anti-Chavez innuendo. His columns have given mainstream credence to the ideas that the democratically elected president is actually a dictator, that a media law banning explicit sex on television is an act of political censorship, and that important literacy and health care programs are nothing more than a cynical attempt to buy votes from Venezuela’s unwashed masses.

The power of a Post editorial is significant, and it is partly due to the work of Mr. Diehl that the storylines above, although easily refuted, have framed the discussion of Venezuela in the U.S. press.
axisoflogic.com

Bolivia has Evo Morales. Mexico has the Zapatista movement. Argentina is Kirchner’s. Where do social movements stop when facing progressiveness that restores power? Are these governments the triumph, or the downfall of these movements? Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar, a Mexican with vast experience in Bolivia, visited Buenos Aires to talk about these themes with local movements and with LaVaca.org, offering a deep look to look at the continent in its own mirror.

Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar is a small and intense woman. With an academic background in mathematics and sociology, her C.V., nevertheless, focuses mainly on the unstable political sands of Latin American politics. She began in her native Mexico with exiled El Salvadorians of the FMLN, and 20 years later she continued her work in Bolivia, where she was arrested in April of ’92 on charges of armed uprising and numerous other charges, for having been part of the Tupac Katari Guerrilla Army (EGTK). In the raid, she fell alongside her companions, amongst whom were Felipe Quispe, current leader of the Pachacutik Indigenous Movement-MIP, and Alvaro García Linera, Bolivia’s brand new vice-president elect.

Raquel was released from jail on April 25, 1997, thanks to a hunger strike that forced her legal situation, and to an endless number of international protests that pressured for her liberation. In 2001 she returned to Mexico, where she currently lives and works along with a group of women, all former political prisoners. It’s logical therefore that her current work is that of linking processes so different from one another like the Mexican and Bolivian social movements.

With this history at her back, practically unknown in Argentina, Raquel arrived in Buenos Aires to share in a round table of chatting and mate in the recuperated printing press Chilavert, along with members of different local social experiences. People from MTD of Solano, MTD Maximiliano Kosteki of Guernica, the Escuela Crediendo Juntos de Moreno (the Growing Together School of Moreno), the Grupo de Arte Callejero (the Street Art Group), the UNT de Avellaneda, and several individuals from here and there came together to share, for almost three hours, an exchange over the situation of the three different countries that share a common challenge: what to do from here. The hosts of the meeting were members of the Colectivo Situaciones (Situations Collective), and were responsible for weaving together the threads and sowing the questions.
upsidedownworld.org

The first round of Peru’s presidential election makes maverick nationalist Ollanta Humala the favourite.
The news that Ollanta Humala was leading in the opinion polls, ahead of Peru’s first-round presidential elections on Sunday 9 April, set alarm bells ringing in Washington and sent the stock-exchange in Lima tumbling.

Still, not even a furious smear campaign by his opponents has done anything to dent the popularity of Humala, an ex-army lieutenant-colonel, self-styled nationalist and acknowledged protégé of Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chávez. On the contrary, the more the establishment pounds him, the more popular he becomes.

As predicted Humala won Sunday’s vote with around 30% of the ballots. This is well short of the 50% needed for an outright win so a run-off election will be held on 7 May. What is still unclear is who his opponent will be. The conservative candidate, Lourdes Flores, and the former president and centre-left candidate, Alan García, are technically tied for second place with around 25% of the vote each. It will take days before all the ballots are counted and a second place winner announced. If Flores does go through, all eyes will be on García to see whether he endorses either of his rivals.

Humala, charismatic and forceful, is a clean-cut, fit, 43-year-old with an attractive wife and two children. He has spent over twenty years in the army, holds a master’s degree in political science, and both he and his wife, Nadine Heredia, are enrolled as doctoral students at the Sorbonne. Humala is less bombastic than his mentor Chávez, and more articulate than his soulmate, Bolivia’s new president, Evo Morales. He counts among his heroes the French soldier-statesman Charles de Gaulle and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, founder of Peru’s reformist Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance [Apra]) and a leading proponent of nationalist revolutions in Latin America.

The world first heard of Humala in October 2000, when he and his brother Antauro led a failed military rebellion against the authoritarian then-president Alberto Fujimori. (Fujimori fled Peru for Japan in 2000 in the face of scandal and instability, and is currently being held in Chile as Peru seeks his extradition.) In 2004, Antauro – who is now in prison – led a second, equally ill-planned, uprising against Peru’s current president, Alejandro Toledo.

The two renegade brothers are the sons of Isaac Humala, a labour lawyer, former communist and the founder of etnocacerismo – an indigenous nationalist doctrine with slightly fascist overtones. (The Peruvian press had a field day recently when Ollanta’s mother called for homosexuals to be shot.) Humala, who categorically denies being homophobic, has abandoned etnocacerismo and tried to distance himself from his eccentric family. His nationalism is now defined as a belief that those excluded from Peruvian political and economic life – for reasons of class, ethnic background or gender – should become fully empowered citizens. “In some cases they call it leftist or socialist, others call it indigenismo. In Peru we call it nationalism”, he says. “What we are looking for is an alternative to the neo-liberal model.”
upsidedownworld.org

New Challenge to U.S. Drug Policy in Andes
LIMA, Peru — The front-running presidential candidate in Peru, having pledged to put a stop to coca eradication, represents the latest challenge to a regional U.S.-financed counternarcotics effort that shows signs of fraying at its edges, according to U.S. and South American analysts.

Like the recently elected Bolivian president, Evo Morales, Ollanta Humala has campaigned against the coca eradication programs that are central to an anti-drug plan in the Andes. Humala says much of the coca being cultivated is being used in teas and traditional medicines, not being turned into cocaine.

“We’re going to protect the coca grower, and we’re going to stop the forced eradication of their crops,” he said during a rally last month, La Republica newspaper reported. “It must be understood that there are more than 30,000 families that cultivate coca leaf, and no government has ever protected them.”

The United States has poured about $5 billion into an Andean anti-drug plan since 2000, including about $720 million in Peru. But if Humala wins the decisive second-round election, to be held in May or early June, the United States’ main ally in its eradication efforts — Colombia — will stand as a virtual island in the Andes, surrounded by countries with governments critical of Washington’s policies. If continued breakdowns in cooperation occur in Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia or Ecuador, some U.S. officials say they fear that progress made to fight coca cultivation in Colombia could be undermined as production migrates across its borders.

Is that truly what they fear?

Young black men, according to several studies, are in a bad way – with joblessness and incarceration at alarming highs, and a street culture of swagger reinforcing these conditions as “normal.” As a neglected group, they now need America’s focused attention.

It’s disheartening to learn that:

• In 2004, half of African-American men in their 20s were without work. Among high school dropouts, it was 72 percent. The dropout classification is relevant, because in inner cities more than half of all black men do not finish high school.

• By their late 20s, more African-American male dropouts are behind bars than behind a desk or otherwise legally earning a paycheck. By their mid-30s, 6 in 10 black men who had quit high school had done time in prison – a record that compounds the challenge of finding work.

These problems aren’t new, but they’ve grown worse – despite a long economic expansion in the 1990s, and contrary to gains by African-American women, according to studies from several US universities and other institutions that were compiled and reported on last month by The New York Times.

The worrisome trends continue debate within the black community as to whether the cause of this human tragedy is cultural or structural – a problem that requires a change in attitude or a change in resources.

Those on the cultural side argue that what’s needed is a shift toward greater responsibility within the African-American community. The structural advocates see other significant factors at work – overly harsh sentencing, the loss of blue-collar jobs, poor schools, and remaining forms of racism.

This dichotomy of the same problem is not helpful. It pits solutions against one another, when they’re by no means mutually exclusive.

After years working on these issues, government, as well as the private sector, knows what works. Philadelphia, for instance, knows that its Don’t Fall Down in the Hood effort to help teenage boys who broke gun laws or drug laws is making a difference. The same is true for Baltimore and its Center for Fathers, Families and Workforce Development, a nonprofit that helps build character and work skills. The federal government’s decades-old Jobs Corps and newer Youth Opportunity centers are also proven.

But from the president on down to the local pastor, these programs need sustained attention and resources. Columbia professor Ronald Mincy, editor of “Black Males Left Behind,” points out that $50 billion has been spent to move poor women off welfare and into jobs. He has a point when he argues that a similar push must be made with black males.

The force behind government-driven welfare reform in 1996, however, was personal responsibility – a neat overlap with comedian Bill Cosby’s blunt calls for culture change among African-Americans. With 70 percent of black babies born out of wedlock, families are adrift and lack parenting skills. And street culture glorifies drug money, status fashion, violence, and sexual conquest.

Young black males are like anyone else. They want fulfillment and success. A major effort must now be made on all fronts so that success translates into a contribution to society instead of a drain on it.
news.yahoo.com

Oy vey. Muddy the waters so you don’t have to talk about racism.

* It’s all about keeping illegal labour plentiful and unskilled wages low

The United States is the only large First World country with a long border with a Third World country. And only the U.S. among developed countries has a politically powerful domestic lobby that wants a large steady flow of unskilled immigrants, preferably illegal ones.

These two oddities explain why immigration is such an explosive topic there and why Congress can’t pass a law regulating the flow.

The collapse recently of bipartisan talks in the Senate on a new immigration bill probably ends for this year the attempt to impose order on what many Americans see as out-of-control illegal immigration.

What split both parties and doomed the law were President Bush’s proposals for an amnesty for nine million of the estimated 11 million illegal immigrants already there, and a new program to admit an extra 400,000 temporary “guest workers” every year.

The House of Representatives recently passed a much tougher law with serious penalties for employers who hire illegal immigrants and construction of an 1,100-kilometre fence along the Mexican border, but with Congress now in recess for two weeks, that’s probably dead, too.

This is all about Mexicans. The U.S., contrary to local belief, doesn’t have a high proportion of recent immigrants compared to other industrialized countries. No more than one person in eight is foreign-born, considerably less than Canada (where it’s one in five) and not much more than in large European countries like Germany, France or Britain.

But no other country has so many illegal immigrants, nor so many who are unskilled, nor such a high share from a single country.

The great majority of “undocumented workers” (illegal immigrants) in the U.S. are Mexican. Their large numbers and high visibility raise paranoid fears among some longer established Americans that the U.S. is becoming bilingual.

They also stir a wider concern that this large and vulnerable workforce of illegal immigrants is deliberately maintained by employers as a way of keeping the wages of unskilled workers down.

The language issue is largely a red herring: Most Hispanic families have become fluent in English by the second generation, just as previous waves of immigrants did before them.

But the argument that illegal immigrants take jobs away from many equally unskilled native-born Americans, and drive wages down for the rest, has never been convincingly refuted, even though it remains politically incorrect.

It’s not that native-born American high-school dropouts “won’t do those jobs.” They just won’t do them for five or eight dollars an hour — or at least, a lot of them won’t.

Many poor Americans simply have no choice, however, and end up working long hours in miserable jobs for half the money that an unskilled French or German worker would earn for doing the same work.

One of the most ridiculous myths of American political discourse is the argument that the U.S.-Mexican frontier is too long to police effectively and humanely.

Here is a country that has landed people on the moon, and that currently maintains an army of 140,000 soldiers in a hostile country halfway around the planet, claiming that it cannot build and maintain a decent fence along the Mexican border.

Instead, we’ve seen a 30-year charade in which fences are built in the traditional urban crossings, forcing illegal Mexican immigrants out into the desert where many die — but enough get through to keep the U.S.’s low-wage industries fully manned.

Living next to Mexico, where so many live in Third-World conditions, does create an immigration problem for the U.S., but it’s far from insoluble. It just hasn’t been solved because powerful U.S. economic interests don’t want it solved.

Everything that’s been so earnestly debated recently in the U.S. — quotas for guest-workers, amnesties for long-resident illegal immigrants, and so on — is just political cover to keep illegal immigrant labour plentiful and unskilled wages low.
hamiltonspectator.com

Campus Lockdown Appalls Parents
As students from neighboring secondary schools walked out of class recently to protest immigration legislation, one Inglewood elementary school imposed a lockdown so severe that some students were barred from using the restroom. Instead, they used buckets placed in classroom corners or behind teachers’ desks.

Appalled by the school’s action, Worthington Elementary School parents have complained to the school board and plan to attend another board meeting next week.

Principal Angie Marquez imposed the lockdown March 27 when nearly 40,000 middle and high school students across Southern California staged walkouts.

But Marquez, who did not return telephone calls for comment, apparently misread the district handbook and ordered the most restrictive lockdown — one reserved for nuclear attacks.

Tim Brown, director of operations for the Inglewood Unified School District, confirmed that some students were forced to use the buckets but said the principal’s order was an “honest mistake.”

An arson attack over the Easter weekend on a Muslim sanctuary in the Spanish city of Ceuta marked another step in what some experts fear is a growing incidence of Islamophobia in the country.

Ceuta lies on a small peninsula in North Africa and a third of the population is Muslim. The burning of the Sidi Bel Abbas sanctuary comes just three months after another sanctuary in the enclave was attacked by arsonists.

Authorities in the city said yesterday that they were considering putting security cameras around mosques, shrines and buildings belonging to other religions in order to dissuade potential attackers.

Although it was unclear yesterday whether those who burned the sanctuary were non-Muslims or fundamentalists opposed to the form of worship practised by local Muslims, it came amid reports of a growing number of attacks across Spain.

El País newspaper yesterday listed a number of mosques and other Muslim targets that have been ransacked, burned or had copies of the Qur’an set alight by intruders.

Police said that extreme rightwingers and skinhead groups were responsible for almost all the attacks.
guardian.co.uk

The Spanish have spent a good bit of the past 500 years burning the Islamic evidence of the true Spanish identity. As for Ceuta, it was an Islamic city in North Africa before Spain decided it was a Spanish city. And I bet these ‘skinheads’ have the same questionable provenance as al Qaeda.

Two Gypsies shot as Russian race attacks continue
Police in Russia are investigating the murder of two Gypsies in the latest of a spate of violent attacks on foreigners and people from ethnic minorities.
The two brothers, aged 26 and 27, were shot dead in Kuznetsovka in the northwest of the country by an attacker with a hunting rifle. A 23-year-old suspect has been arrested, but police said there was no evidence that the attack on Sunday was race related.

Last week a gang of young men attacked a Gypsy camp in the southern Volgograd region, beating to death a man and a woman and seriously injuring a 14-year-old girl and an 80-year-old woman. Nine suspects are being questioned.

On Saturday, two Mongolian students were taken to hospital after a group of young men attacked them in St Petersburg. A Senegalese student was shot dead in the city this month by an assailant using a gun emblazoned with a swastika.

Critics yesterday blamed the Kremlin. “The Russian authorities are not eloquent or explicit enough in expressing themselves or in the pursuit of a policy of curbing nationalism and xenophobia,” the veteran liberal politician Grigory Yavlinksy told reporters. “They are trying to play down the situation. That is wrong and very dangerous.”

Police have been accused of charging many perpetrators of attacks on dark-skinned people with hooliganism, rather than race crimes, which carry higher sentences. Last year a political party was banned from local elections in Moscow after a campaign broadcast that equated dark-skinned immigrants with rubbish that needed to be cleaned from the city.