[pf] Brain Food - two major articles

· A New Zealander sent these to me, from Jay Hanson's BRAIN FOOD newsletter 

http://davd.tripod.ca/USA-s_control_not_accepted.html#top 
  contains three articles relevant to these times.
My edited excerpts, which I've put at the top of that page:
 (there's also a link to help sign-up to the newsletters)

1. Terrorism Ahead? 
by Patrick J. Buchanan; January 12, 1999 
- America is the only nation on Earth to claim a right to intervene
militarily in every region of the world. But this foreign policy is not
America's tradition; it is an aberration.
  Before 1981, Libya's Col. Qaddafi had not targeted Americans. But Reagan
sent U.S. ships and planes across his "line of death" in the Gulf of Sidra,
shot down his jets and sank his patrol boats. Result: ...
 Filipino terrorists used to attack Americans until we withdrew from Subic
Bay and Clark Air Force Base. Now, they don't. 


2. IMF's four steps to damnation 
by Gregory Palast, Observer (UK); Sunday April 29, 2001
- How crises, failures, and suffering finally drove a Presidential adviser
to the wrong side of the barricades
· Step One is privatisation. ... the possibility of commissions for shaving
a few billion off the sale price. ...the 1995 Russian sell-off. 
... Stiglitz cannot simply be dismissed as a conspiracy nutter. The man was
inside the game - a member of Bill Clinton's cabinet, chairman of the
President's council of economic advisers. ... sick-making for Stiglitz is
that the US-backed oligarchs stripped Russia's industrial assets, with the
effect that national output was cut nearly in half. 
· Step Two is capital market liberalisation. ... Cash comes in for
speculation in real estate and currency, then flees at the first whiff of
trouble. A nation's reserves can drain in days. 
· Step Three: ... raising prices on food, water and cooking gas. This
leads, predictably, to: 
· Step-Three-and-a-Half: what Stiglitz calls 'the IMF riot'. ... painfully
predictable. ... The IMF riots (and by riots I mean peaceful demonstrations
dispersed by bullets, tanks and tear gas) cause new flights of capital and
government bankruptcies. This economic arson has its bright side - for
foreigners, who can then pick off remaining assets at fire-sale prices.
· Step Four: free trade. This is free trade by the rules of the World Trade
Organisation and the World Bank, which Stiglitz likens to the Opium Wars.
'That too was about "opening markets",' he said. 


3. Post-Autistic Economics newsletter. Issue 8; 5 Sept. 2001
- In agreement with and in support of the Post-Autistic Economics Movement
and the Cambridge Proposal, we believe that economic theory, inhibited by
its non-historical approach and abstract formalist methodology, has
provided only a limited understanding of the challenging complexity of
economic behavior. The narrow methodological approach of economics hinders
its ability to generate truly pragmatic and realistic policy prescriptions 

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sent to the Positive Futures list by David. (Bcc's to R.R. and Jay Hanson)
David MacClement [davd @ ihug.co.nz] (remove spaces)
http://davd.tripod.com/GrRR-010907_titles.html#top
http://www.geocities.com/davd.geo/index.html#top
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