Economist Versus Idiot: It's About Time To Watch Yi-Yi Again, As I've Forgotton How To Marathon

The World Last Week

-Obama took the presidential oath twice due to the weirdness of that one portion where he and John Roberts played jinx with each other.

-Stanislav Marklov, a human rights lawyer who had represented a Chechen family--one of whom was raped and murdered by a Russian officer--was killed in Moscow.  This is the 900th update on violent shit happening to decent people in Russia in the last few years, no one getting caught, the Kremlin not caring, and the world behaving like this is somehow normal.

-A member of the Netherlands parliament has been charged with making anti-Islamic statements, which is apparently a crime there.  Wait, so the Dutch can smoke weed in bars, but some guy can't make a shitty documentary? 

-Did you know there was a ceasefire in Israel?  There was, for a couple of days.  Again:  this is not a good blog to keep up with Israel on, because no matter what the Economist says and how I repeat it here, trust me, something happened five minutes ago.  Look, a pony!

-2000 Rwandan troops entered the Congo.  It wasn't a mistake, and they aren't taking a vacation.  Get ready for this one.  It's going to be very, very bad.

-In more freedom of speech fun, Harry Nicolaides got sentenced to three years in prison for "defaming the Thai royal family" in his self-published novel that nobody read.  Thanks, Thailand!  Regardless of the fact that you had to use some draconian law, getting more self-published authors off the street is something I will always get behind.

-Here's some more Thai news:  apparently the Thai armed forces caught about 1000 boat people and dumped them in the middle of the sea with a little bit of food and no engines.  Most of them were trying, for the second time, to get the hell out of the clutches of the Burmese military junta, who are still assholes.  (The kind of assholes that kill and starve people, not the kind who make fun of your taste in music.)

-Just to remind everybody that the world can end up in a much scarier place if the winds change, India fucked around and test fired a cruise missile.  While the intention was to scare Pakistan, which it sort of did, it probably emboldened them a bit too--since they missed their target.

-The guy who used to run Time Warner will be taken over Citigroup.  Because hey, why not?  Everything is dust in the end.

-Ebay had the first year-on-year decline in revenue, but Apple and IBM saw their profits go up a bit.  I'm somewhat to blame for the Ebay thing, as I've stopped buying hardcover first edition copies of Day of the Jackal.

-Carlos Slim--who continues to win the prize for best rich guy name and currently owns almost 7% of the New York Times--loaned the paper another $250 million dollars, for which they'll have to pay 14% interest.  Nobody fucks with Carlos Slim.

-A former KGB agent bought London's Evening Standard for, supposedly, one pound sterling.  Hopefully somebody with a sexy accent will explain this to me in a way that makes it sound less dumb than it reads.

-Fiat made a deal with Chrysler, and while I'm not educated enough in the field of automobile manufacturing to make a decent assessment, this has to be one of the stupidest ideas I read this week.  It's like Fiat were desperate to find a way to lose, and then somebody pointed out that Chrysler was in the street throwing up and crying, and they thought that sounded pretty awesome, so they gave Chrysler a dress and took it to a high school prom.

-Oh, this weeks recap is hella short too.  Apologies for that, but the issue was late.  Blame the US Postal service, but don't blame them loudly.  Them mofos get crazy for real.

Leaders

-No, Obama got his cover and leader last week, and so the Economist is giving it over to the banks this week.  Cover, a fourteen page report on "the future of finance" and this leader article.  The magazine has moved away from last years "ra-ra nationalize" stance that it seemed to be leaning towards, and yet they're still stuck in a bit of a quandary:  the magazine's overall philosophy that nationalization is bad versus what they consider a lack of realistic options.  (If you're interested, the Economist website has hosted a stream of conversation/debate/internet-style-fuck-you-idiot stuff since last year.  More than a few readers of the publication have taken offense at the editors support of nationalization for Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac and Northern Rock, all of which are mentioned here as being something "we argued for...long before politicians in either country succumbed to the inevitable.")  It's fun and easy for some--including me--to occasionally treat these editorials in a vacuum, to view them as mouthpiece for dogma and less the sort of interrogative journalism that makes up the other sections of the Economist.  It's easy because yes, sometimes it's true.  This magazine has a stance, it's one that's unerringly liberal in social dynamics (gay marriage, medical insurance, unemployment benefits) and, for lack of a more accurate term, conservative, when it comes time to look at things like free trade, unfettered capitalism and the like.  But this editorial isn't necessarily that, and while I don't expect the Economist to start rethinking some basic ideals they've held for over 100 years, it can't be denied, and it shouldn't be ignored, that the current economic situation (viewed from a global standpoint) is one that has put some serious difficulty on the sort of religious embrace of Friedman style economics that they've grown so fond of in the last twenty years.  I won't be dealing with the 14 page dossier here, because there are (ha ha) some things that I think are better experienced without a bit of Tucker in the way.  If you want to check them out, they are, as always, available for free.

-The Economist's take on the inauguration was, thankfully, not quite like most of the other takes I've read or seen.  A frank, happy acknowledgment of the historical aspect of America's first black president, a stiff upper lip winch at the more over-the-top colloquialism's thrown into his first presidential speech, and a sigh of relief that the man seems to grasp the amount of difficulty facing his term in the Oval Office.  While you've probably read, and possibly told, your version of what you thought about that cold DC morning already, here it is:  another one.  It's followed up in the US section with a more extensive "what's he gonna do" article that I've about reached my limit on.  Since Obama has been kind enough to, you know, do some shit, this will hopefully be the last one of these I'm stuck reading.

-Ha, ha, ha, he said, blood pouring from his mouth:  do you want to read about the dashed off Economist response to the Israeli cease-fire?  I mean, everything in here is written in the foolish tones of someone who thought this past week was going to be one where they weren't still fighting, so hey:  it's like a short story in a time capsule.  No longer applicable, and only intermittently not depressing.

-I hate to say that I agree with this article, but damn it, I agree with this article:  NASA should, for now, stop working towards manned space exploration.  Admittedly, I'm full bore in agreement with most of the reasons the Economist gives--"domestic policy should usually trump grandiose foreign adventures"--and I'd certainly be interested in some more specific reasons about what NASA's defense of costly manned missions are in place of cheaper (and seemingly more beneficial) robot knowledge hunters.  I will note that I don't necessarily care too much about one of their reason trees, which is that we should think long and hard about what kind of germs and microbes human's might transfer to other planets.  I get where they are going with it, but let's not base any kind of exploration policy on something human beings have never, ever, fucking cared about before.

Letters

-There weren't a lot of letters of note this week, other than a complaint from Nairobi that the Economist is too negative towards Africa, and that they too often demand "paternalist assistance" for the continents woes.  I haven't read this magazine for decades, so maybe the guy is right, but from the few years that I have, he seems to be more than a little off base--they always start each recommendation for Africa with the same format, first saying "fix it yourself", second saying "the African Union should fix it", third saying "the United Nations should handle it" and only after all of those do they say "or just get anybody, get that plumber that America likes so much."  On the "too much bad news" thing--well sorry.  That's just selective reading--as far as I can tell, the only thing the Economist is ever positive about is in the obituaries, where they say "this person was totally rad."

United States

-Why this is a story, I don't know, but it is:  Texas has a yearly thing called the Lone Star State's Black Tie and Boots extravaganza.  It costs $125 bucks to go to, has a lot of alcohol, brisket and shrimp and--I'm sorry?--an armadillo named Scooter.  Okay guys, I give up.  Why the fuck is this in the Economist?  It's like that debutante ball thing last week--I'm starting to question whether the editors have lost their grip on who their audience is.

-Did you know the presidential inauguration was "the greenest in history?"  That the carpet that Obama was sworn in on was recycled?  Did that make you feel good?  Okay, wait.  That made you feel good?  Man, you must be happy all the time.  That's a low threshold for feeling good.  Anyway, here's pointless article number two:  there was a lot of trash in the streets after the inauguration.  Man, I'm all for filler, most of my life and personal thought is totally filler, but Economist, come on.  If there's one magazine that's already long enough, it's this magazine.  No need for these.

-Okay, and here's another one!  What's the deal?!  It's a briefing on Denver's annual stock show, which includes a picture of a woman vacuuming a...what is that, a goat?  A calf?  It's a calf.  She's using a vacuum cleaner on a calf?  I mean, sure, I'm glad I know that now, but dude I don't have oodles of time.

-Okay, here's some real news.  Pensions funds, across the country, every state:  going to be a problem soon enough, maybe even a crisis of infinite states.  This article focuses specifically on Illinois--the president's home state has only 54% of the assets needed to meet it's future benefits costs to workers, and the Economist claims that 80% is what is required.  The problem is that the only plans involved to repair the problems are clearly unpopular, as they require stiffening various benefits and holding off on new promises to current workers (which is part of the reason that the 1995 actions taken in Illinois to stop this exact problem failed).  While nobody wants to watch Illinois get in bad trouble in hopes that will motivate other states to take definitive action, hey:  nobody wanted to watch the governor humiliate himself and the state either.

-Lexington lines up some of the complaints already leveled at Barack Obama by his own supporters, and while he certainly exaggerates their impact and scope, it's actually not too bad of a column.  While it's doubtful that you can find a lot of homosexuals that were excited about Rick Warren's involvement in the inauguration, it seems unlikely to me that too many of Obama's gay supporters didn't grasp that just because Rick Warren is a dumb asshole that says and does all kinds of disgusting things, that doesn't necessarily mean that Obama letting him say a prayer is going to somehow set back civil or gay rights anymore than all the other dumb shit that Rick Warren says on TV all the time.  It's also weird how Lexington decides to give lip service to the complaints of Code Pink, an anti-war group that was never that much behind Obama in the first place, and is certainly not an organization that any sizable number of Americans give a fuck about anyway.  Okay, last one from me, but there's more in the article--"people who used to flock to [Obama's] rallies with placards demanding that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney be tried as war criminals are aghast."  Well, let's look at that.  Okay, finished.  Those people are fucking crazy and stupid.  Who cares that they are "aghast"?  Anybody who thought that Obama was going to put Bush and Cheney on trial for war crimes is a moron.  (Look, they could have been caught eating live babies out of a bathtub built on top of a throne made from the flesh of Katrina victims, and they would never go on trial.  That's not how the American system is set up, you silly jackass.  It's how the Nation's editorial page is set up, but hey:  just because a guy has a card table and a megaphone, that doesn't mean he talks to God.)

The Americas

-Cesare Battisti is an Italian writer who used to belong to a group called the Armed Proletarians for Communism, which probably has a less-lame sounding name in Italian.  He's recently been given refugee status in Brazil when the Italian government tried to extradite him for the murder of two policemen in the late 1970's, as well as participation in the murder of a butcher, and on top of that the plotting of the murder of a jeweler in front of his 14 year old kid.  (He was convicted in abstentia.)  Italy's been trying to get him for years, if you're thinking this is a late in the day type thing, but he was in France before that and the French are really into telling Italy to go fuck itself when they try to extradite people.  The Economist questions why, exactly, the Brazilian government cares enough to protect the guy, because they disagree with the notion that Brazil seems to have embraced, which is that Battisti is a political exile and not just some random killer type.  There isn't enough of an article here to form a major opinion, and the Economist basically proposes an argument that you have to trust they are right about, or you can just read it, look at a picture of Battisti tossing a cocky smile, and figure "hey, fucked up."

Asia

-Hey, remember how they were going to put Chen Shui-Bian, the president of Taiwan from 2000-2008 on trial for corruption?  Yeah, that's still happening, and as of last week, it officially got going.  While there's a knee-jerk response of "Awesome, lawbreakers should be put on trial, no matter who they are", the Economist points out that there's something odd (maybe even...corrupt, you might say) going on with the trial so far.  First up, he'd actually been released without bail last month, and all of a sudden--with no explanation as to why--the panel of judges who made that decision were replaced by a new panel who reimprisoned him two weeks later.  Those same judges are in charge of the trial, and in another weird circumstance, the prosecuting attorneys performed a skit at some gala event where they ridiculed Mr. Chen.  Then, the skit got shown on television.  Of course, Chen's son, daughter-in-law and brother-in-law all recently plead guilty last week to laundering money for the family, so yeah, he's probably one guilty ass motherfucker, but still:  decorum.  Decorum is sweet!

Middle East and Africa

-Okay, here's three more articles about Israel, one of which you can just hold off on reading until they stop shooting at each other again, the other two remain a bit interesting:  whether or not Israel will believe that this recent war was worth it and what the people of Gaza will be doing in the near future.  Otherwise, what I said above seems to be the best way to deal with this stuff.  It's fine writing, but it's already dated.  Dated.  It's already dated and it's been a week.  Geez.

Europe

-Probably one of the most interesting trio of articles in recent memory, it's nigh-impossible to accurately summarize these three articles about protests and social unrest in France, eastern Europe and Spain, so check them out if you have the time.  Out of everything though, it's most fascinating to me that anarcho-syndicalism is actually on the upswing in France.  In case you haven't read your old Chomsky in a while, anarcho-syndicalism being one of that guys favorite forms of anti-government, it's rare to see it have enough of a support network to be of mention as an active force, rarer still for that to be in a country like France.  There's plenty of information out there about the concepts behind it (or lack thereof) but this specific group is known as Solidaire Unitaire Democratique, a nice sounding name for a bunch of people that are anti-establishment, non-hierarchical and without any official leaders.  Recent triumphs have included the disruption of train services.  I don't subscribe to this particular ideology myself, but it's certainly an odd time to be living in where the actions of such an extreme-belief organization is actually part of the news cycle.  What's next?

Britain

-January 25th served as the 250th anniversary of the birth of Scottish poet Robert Burns, celebration involves a Burns supper.  What's a Burns supper?  Oh, it's when you drink a shitload of whiskey, eat "a concoction of minced offal, fat and oatmeal stuffed into a sheep's stomach" (haggis, mofo) and...read poetry, I guess.  Yay?  I guess that gets a Yay.

International

-Thinks aren't looking good for al-Qaeda, despite them taking credit for the global economic situation, which Osama bin Laden recently said was a result of the organization's jihad.  (He also claimed that democracy is a form of polytheism, which is kind of true if, like bin Laden, you use the rationale of a fucking third grader to explain things when it suits your purpose.)  Most of the criticism of al-Qaeda in this article comes from the statements of one of it's former founders, Sayyid Iman al-Shariff.  He's currently fighting a one man public relations war against his former organization, pointing out that their policy of declaring entire populations of countries (including predominately Muslim ones) to be apostates--which al-Qaeda uses as a shell to make the wholesale murder of civilians acceptable under sharia--is in basic violation with the traditional Islamic laws regarding indiscriminate killing.  The negotiation of how to make the murder of civilians acceptable is probably the most fascinating story involving al-Qaeda, and yet it's one that rarely gets talked about.  This article only touches on it, but that's enough for it to be worth some time.

-It's about time to get a new secretary-general for NATO, as the current one will relinquish the post sometime this summer.  The Economist doesn't really get behind any specific candidate, but I imagine they will when the list is more clearly defined.  This article just nails the probables, including Polish Radek Sikorski, Bulgarian Solomon Passy, British Des Browne, an unnamed unknown from Germany, Canadians Peter MacKay and John Manley, and international Danish superstar Anders Fogh Rasmussen, who is really hot but should stop smiling like it makes his face hurt.  Seriously, that guy is a very attractive man.

-Here's an interesting claim in the good news department--the number of deaths worldwide among young children went down by half in 2007.  (That's still 10 million, but that means 10 million less than the year before which is, by any estimation:  totally awesome!)  Meanwhile, the WHO believes they can officially eradicate polio within a few years.  The number of new polio cases was 350,000 in 1988, and it's now down to 2,000.  While there's some problems with vaccinations--the usual version doesn't work well in India, and the rumor that vaccines were part of a secret sterilization program causes serious problems among Nigerian Muslims.  (That problem then helped to create a stronger strain of polio, here referred to as the Nigerian strain.)  It's not going to be cheap, but a study is mentioned in the article that recently proved that a full-scale eradication effort is actually less expensive than "sustained vigilance and health costs."  This is one article that could have been a lot longer.

Finance and Economics

-One of the few times that the argument of "nothing happened, so it worked" is sort of accurate.  A lot of the complaints about the massive bail-outs that so many countries have made has been that the money was wasted, or that it didn't work, etc.  The Economist points out that, while all the goals of last years billions in bail-outs weren't met, some of them were, and those that were--the sort of 1929 bank runs that often explode into riots and overall insanity, as well as a collapse of a large enough retail bank that would have resulted into a complete exhaustion of the FDIC's imperiled reservation funds--were pretty goddamn important.  The new problem is something different--not being sure what's happening.  Few would argue that capital is flowing out (in the form of loans) the way it needs to for business to survive, and yet those few that do argue that it is happen to be...bank executives.  Ignoring this last weeks blood-on-the-lens headline story regarding executive bonuses--honestly, that was bad, but it has little to do with the way global finance works and fixing it is a side job at best--something has to be done to make things more explicit.  The problem that this article runs into, a problem that's going to be endemic in any article the Economist writes on the subject, is that many of the possible solutions clash with their basic philosophy of business.  More lucid talk would require an openness that could cripple the capitalistic nature of competition, and the ultimate method (while certainly not the only, or best) for having more openness remains, as it was in 2008, nationalization.

-Buttonwood thankfully takes a break from what was becoming a repellent trend where he spent every week sifting the remains of global capitalism in search of ways in which people could make money.  (Think of the nerds version of grave-robbing during a genocide, you're on the right track.)  This week, it's all about how the debt downgrade of countries like Greece, Spain and Portugal could lead to the same level of economic collapse and financial evisceration recently seen in Iceland, and how the trend seems to be actually growing--Ireland is likely to be next, with debts that "have been estimated to be 230% of gross domestic product."  Obviously, countries in default operate far differently than a company going bankrupt--they don't shut their doors and turn off their lights, for instance--but the comparison is somewhat apt.

-Here's an odd article that examines an area I'd never heard of, although it sounds vaguely similar to those flex spending plans they offer at some jobs:  scrip.   Scrip is an alternative type of currency that loses value the longer it isn't spent, convincing people to use it and not save.  It's American history is mostly in the past, being used back in the Depression, but it's still somewhat active in Germany and actually quite popular in Bavaria.  The way it works is---well, I couldn't really tell you.  It's a short ass article, but the best I can tell is that it prevents people from saving it, which doesn't help the larger economy, and gets them to spend it fast, which does.  (Because the next person down the line has to spend it even quicker depending on how long the purchaser held it.)  Weird shit, right?

Science and Technology

-Electronic paper is on the way, and despite the various scientists still struggling with a method to bring color imagery into the equation, it's difficult not to come away realizing that when this stuff comes along, it's going to be extremely profitable.  It's also going to change the print market in a way that's even more massive, but that's a bit harder to guess at.  But the idea that you can print thin sheets of plastic on a roll for it to be sliced into small screens, that it can use small amounts of energy to "flip" the page--there's no way around it.  This is a big fucking deal.  The title of this article, however, is a dumb pop culture reference.

-People are more likely to procrastinate a task if it's an abstract one that requires more thought and preparation than they are when a task has specific steps involved.  Once again, science has sought to prove something that probably could have been learned by listening to a random person's grandmother for about 17 hours straight.  It's like monkeys typing, listening for wisdom baubles to squirt out of granny's lips.

Books and Arts

-Like Abraham Lincoln last week, the Economist lead book feature is a glance at the "avalanche" of books regarding Charles Darwin on the way to stores--it's about time for the 150th anniversary of "Origin of Species" as well as the 200th of Darwin's birth.  I mean, yeah.  I read some of Richard Rorty's stuff on him, that was pretty good.  I can't help you much here.

-Some fearsome sounding books out about the violence in the Congo, even the titles are menacing:  The Dynamics of Violence in Central Africa as well as Africa's World War: Congo, the Rwandan Genocide and the Making of a Continental Catastrophe.  The Economist likes both, and the review has the tendency (a totally welcome one) to turn into a meditation on why the region, a continued ignorance of these conflicts, and the overall horror of it, must change.  There's props given to both for their attempts to tear down the "fashionable hypotheses about the war and its causes", as well as a frank dismissal that a pat understanding of Africa is all that is required to conceptualize remedy.  All that aside, the picture that accommodates the review--which I'm not going to detail--is even cruller and more sarcastic than I'm comfortable with, and I just finished killing a mouse before reading this.  (It was a sticky trap, which means he was already dead.  No, I didn't particularly enjoy it.)

Obituary: Gaston Lenotre

-A famous pastry chef.  Sounds like a fine individual, and his obsession with fresh ingredients is pretty cool, but to be completely frank, this is a pretty dumb article.  It seems less like the writer actually gives a shit about pastries or Lenotre, and more about writing an obituary that will be referenced in the future as a great piece of writing.  They even blurbed this on the issues cover.  Gaston Lenotre probably deserved better...at the same time, he doesn't sound like someone who would have minded how his obituary read.  That's a great picture though.

All art comes from the Economist and belongs to them, unless otherwise noted.

Skeeter is one of those words I find funnier than anything, but you probably don't, it was written and is the property of Heather Hammond,  the osama with a panda picture is also from the uncyclopedia thing, because I'm lazy and want to go to bed and didn't really spend a lot of time editing this week because I had to assist in firing people which is just as awful as I'd always heard it was going to be, and on top of that I wasn't even aware in the first place that I was going to have to be a part of the whole fucking terrible thing, like I found out exactly five minutes before when I was handed a post-it note and told to go get these people and send them into the conference room, and man, they fucking knew exactly why when I spoke to them and that was awful and then the young one, the girl, man she didn't have any idea and she was just as bright and cheery as she always is and then she spent the rest of the day crying and whatever, i'm putting this in the small font so it's not like she'll read this but fuck i'm sorry, and i'm sorry, and i wish that hadn't happened and if i'd known i swear i would've warned you, I was trying to find a picture of an animal not liking his or her medicine and ended up settling on this picture of a kid sneezing on a cat from one of those websites for freaked out parents, the picture of a Chuck Darwin came from that uncyclopedia thing, which again surprised me by being funny with it's explanation, through pictures, of the evolutionary process.

Comments

[TimCallahan]

Comic shops are notorious for "paying" "employees" in scrip. They don't call it that, though, they call it "store credit." Like you cover a weekend shift so the owner can go to a convention, and he'll give you $100 in store credit. That's scrip.

Also, I'm not worried about the future insolvency of my teacher's pension because I have been stocking up on variant covers of my favorite comics. When I retire, I'll sell those and kick back in piles and piles of cash.

Or trade 'em to my local shop for scrip.

[Chris Rice]

A quick explanation of the London Evening Standard deal - as in the US, UK regional papers are really feeling the advertising pinch, and for the Standard, competition from 2 major free-papers has really driven their profits down, turning it into a real drag on resources for the right-wing Mail group (who also own a butt-load of other regional papers), losing some £10 million a year.
Lebedev obviously wants a UK paper enough to risk the losses, so a token £1 was all he needed to secure it. It was offered out for tender, but in the current climate, the Oligarchs seem to be the only ones with available capital.
Sorry, no sexy accent I'm afraid, unless you have an anglo-fetish...

[Kenny]

I'm behind this week again! Dammit! I'll have to read this at work! (Translation: Yes! I can kill a day at work reading this!)

[Matthew J. Brady]

Re: Illinois pensions - one reason my wife (a teacher) hated Blagojevich even before the whole scandal blew up was that he raided the teachers' pension fund to try to cover the state deficit. I'm sure that wasn't the only pension he screwed around with, which is surely part of why the whole system is fucked. God, our state government sucks.

By the way, she talked about that a lot back during the last gubernatorial election, and if you're wondering how that mop-headed asshole got reelected, it's because his opponent was this crazy right-wing woman who wanted to criminalize abortion and all sorts of other shitty stuff. We had no good choice; I didn't even bother voting. Did I mention that Illinois government sucks?

[Mikael Altemark]

"I don't subscribe to this particular ideology myself, but it's certainly an odd time to be living in where the actions of such an extreme-belief organization is actually part of the news cycle. What's next?"

Actually, syndicalist organisations are more formed on the necessity of non-hierarchical and direct action types of organisations following the failure of established unions, from social democrat to "yellow" unions controlled by the government or by corporations. It is more a movement than an ideology.

It is very true that syndicalism was severely mauled after the authoritarian socialists taking power in Russia in 1917, and was supressed in most countries during WWII. Since the 60's the number of syndicalist organisations functioning as actual unions has been on the rise - the SKT in Siberia is an example of one of the newly formed unions, with 7000 members. The largest union is the CGT in Spain with ~70.000 members.

The SUD is not an anarchosyndicalist union though - even if many libertarian communists (like the activists in SUD-rail, also since long time being members of Alternative Libertaire). SUD is more of a "base democratic union", like Confederazione Italia di Base Unicobas in Italy.

The journalist reporting simply didn't get the facts right even if the subtext is correct (libertarian movements acting as an active force in the labor market).

Most of the people I know who are in the swedish syndicalist union SAC don't subscribe to a particular ideology themselves either - SAC is simply a good fighting union with barriers to prevent fatcats dominating. But many are of course active in other progressive social movements, some are members of political parties (from left party, social democrat, liberal party (liberal in the european sense) or even the christian democrat (conservatives). When it comes to SAC, politics is left at the front door, what matters is your needs and wants - as a collective or individual members - in the workplace.

[Tucker Stone]

Mikael, thank you so much for this comment. After reading the article myself, I'd thrown a note out to do some research, because I haven't heard anything about active anarchosyndicalism since the last time I read Chomsky--which was a while ago--but I just hadn't found the time yet. You've gone ahead and done me one better, and provided an excellent context and history that greatly expands on what I might have found myself.

Thanks again!