Think tanks wrap-up

WASHINGTON, Sept. 26 (UPI) -- The UPI think tank wrap-up is a daily digest covering opinion pieces, reactions to recent news events and position statements released by various think tanks. This is the first of two wrap-ups for Sept. 26.

Institute for Public Accuracy

(The IPA is a nationwide consortium of policy researchers that seeks to broaden public discourse by gaining media access for experts whose perspectives are often overshadowed by major think tanks and other influential institutions.)

WASHINGTON -- The U.S. Economy and War

-- Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

"The economy is facing the largest economic crisis since the great

depression. The collapse of the stock market bubble destroyed more than $5

trillion of paper wealth, and the impending collapse of the housing bubble

will destroy almost as much wealth ..."

-- Diana Zuckerman, president of the National Center for Policy Research for Women & Families.

"The threat of war has sent the stock market reeling, undermined consumer confidence, and is putting enormous pressure on Congress to cut health and safety net programs that millions of women and families rely on...."

-- Richard Du Boff, professor emeritus of economics at Bryn Mawr College and author of "Accumulation and Power: An Economic History of the United States."

"War against Iraq will cost somewhere between $50 billion and $100 billion by most estimates -- excluding postwar costs of occupation of the country for longer than most Americans realize or care to think about. The effect on the U.S. economy will be mildly stimulative, limited only by a possible run-up of oil prices once U.S. attacks on Iraq begin. The basic economic impact of the war will be fiscal. It will represent one more way that Bush is using the terrorism of Sept. 11 as a perfect pretext for carrying out right-wing domestic and international policies that he could only dream about before Seot. 11. In this case, war spending will join 'Homeland Security' spending in crowding out, and reducing, all other 'nonessential' -- in other words, social -- expenditures. The federal budget deficit will be increased, providing another reason to cut government spending; Bush has returned to this theme twice in the past week, and, with congressional Democrats silent on the issue, he has been able to avoid any discussion of his massive and regressive tax cuts coming to a theater near you in the next four to ten years."

-- Doug Henwood, author of the book "Wall Street."

"Though it looked for a while like the recession ended in December, the economy hasn't really recovered, and forward-looking indicators are slipping. So we're either facing another downturn or an extended bout of economic trouble. If we had a grown-up political culture, we'd be seriously discussing some long-term structural issues, like polarization, debt, the causes of the late '90s bubble and the consequences of its breaking. Instead, we're getting gossipy coverage of corporate scandals -- or were, until the war drums drowned everything else out ..."

WASHINGTON -- World Bank and IMF: Problem or Solution?

-- Carola Kinasha is with the Tanzania Gender Networking Program.

"The World Bank continues to support 'user fees' on primary health care in Tanzania, despite the opposition of women's groups to this policy, and despite the fact that this policy blocks access to health care for the poor."

-- Shelly Rao, coordinator of the Economic and Social Justice Program at the Ecumenical Center for Research, Education and Advocacy in Fiji.

"We have been told by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank that our countries' debts are 'sustainable,' but our people lack access to basic education and health care while our governments use scarce resources to pay for Debt."

-- Rudolf Amenga-Etego, national campaign coordinator of the Ghana National Coalition Against the Privatization of Water.

"The 'cost recovery' policies of the World Bank in Ghana led to a 95 percent increase in water rates in 2001. Poor people have lost access and now Ghana is second only to

Sudan in the incidence of guinea worm, thanks to the privatization policies of the World Bank."

-- Mark Weisbrot, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research.

"Our research shows that it is extremely likely that Brazil will default on its external debt; the only question is when. IMF and World Bank policies have failed. The recent IMF 'bailout' did nothing to help the people of Brazil -- it only helped foreign banks get their money out of the country."

-- JIM VALLETTE, research director for the Sustainable Energy and Economy

Network and the author of "Transnational Corporate Beneficiaries of World

Bank Group Fossil Fuel Projects, 1992-2002."

"Our new study shows that many energy corporations facing government investigation here and abroad for alleged accounting irregularities, energy market manipulation, fraud, bribery and human rights abuses have leveraged billions of dollars in World Bank Group financing over the past decade. These include Halliburton (the number two beneficiary of WBG fossil fuel financing at $1.97 billion), Enron (number 11 with $967 million), El Paso Corporation (number five with $1.5 billion) which has been found to have

illegally manipulated the energy markets in California, General Electric (number nine with $1.1 billion) whose accounting practices and executive excesses have placed it on the corporate hot seat, as well as Harken Energy (George W. Bush's old company) and Unocal, which a federal court this month ruled could be liable for human rights abuses associated with its Burma gas venture."

The Ludwig von Mises Institute

(The LVMI is a research and educational center devoted to classical liberalism--often known as libertarianism--and the Austrian School of economics. Grounded in the work of economists Ludwig von Mises and Murray N. Rothbard, LVMI seeks to advance the Austrian School of economics and promote the market economy, private property, sound money and peaceful international relations, while opposing government intervention as economically and socially destructive.)

AUBURN, Ala. -- Intellectuals Rediscover Absolutes

By Tibor R. Machan

In this age of moral relativism, we periodically encounter great displays of moral outrage, ones that presume a fixed standard of right and wrong. We are told daily that some CEOs of large companies have engaged in outrageously immoral conduct and should be justly punished for doing so. If you doubt that the business of business ethics is just as easy as this, you are suspected of improper pro-business bias.

This is very interesting. For the nearly 40 years I have been studying and working in the academy, I have encountered a great many ideas opposed to ethics. Most notable and forthright among them came from the late B. F. Skinner, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, whose best-selling book, "Beyond Freedom and Dignity" denied both that we are free to choose our conduct and that there is any standard of right and wrong by which such conduct could be evaluated.

But Skinner is only the most up-front of the moral skeptics. There are thousands of them at our universities, in psychology, sociology, economics, and philosophy departments. And a great many of those also think that we act because we have to, not because we choose to.

Skepticism and determinism are the dominant views. Some advocate a hybrid called compatibilism, according to which we are both determined to behave as we do and are also responsible for it, all at once.

And there are those who deny there is any bona fide ethics, but who think moral exhortation functions as a kind of training, like it would when we praise or blame domestic animals.

Just how these work beats me, but the idea they advance is out there, admittedly.

Now, people in academe are rarely shy. Most publish books, articles, papers, and essays galore and have no compunction about championing their views anywhere there's a welcoming host for them. Yet, and here is my puzzle, when scandals like the ones at Enron Corporation and WorldCom come around, I do not hear a peep from these skeptics.

I do not find them penning op-ed pieces for The New York Times in which they proclaim that blaming Enron executives is nonsense because there are no standards of right and wrong, no one can know how they ought to have behaved, and, in any case, they weren't free agents but merely did what they had to do.

Evolutionary biologists, who often say that we are hard-wired by our genes to do what we do, are also nowhere to be seen or heard -- on op-ed pages of newspapers or the more or less erudite talk shows across the electromagnetic spectrum -- telling us not to blame these folks who cheated thousands out of their pension funds and carried out innumerable forms of malpractice because, well, no one can help doing what he or she does; it's all que sera, sera.

I don't get it. I am a defender of business as a perfectly honorable profession, have written to that effect in numerous forums, and am sad when business executives behave badly. Anyone who has violated other people's rights should get what justly is coming to him.

I enthusiastically defend the profession of business, as well as business ethics professors, against the likes of Katherine Mangan of The Chronicle of Higher Education, who asks in a recent piece, "Or does the bottom-line-first ethos that many of them (business ethics professors) promote in the classroom help create a system that breeds corruption?"

No, heeding the bottom line first is no different from heeding accuracy in reporting or health in medicine: it does not cancel out ethics; it's just the service one happens to offer in a certain profession!

But those who think ethics is bogus -- and there are literally thousands of them in universities and colleges across the globe -- seem to think mum's the word when it comes to addressing issues from their own point of view. Why don't they champion skepticism and moral ambiguity when it would be relevant, pertinent to do so?

So, perhaps the bulk of academics are just a bunch of cowards. They refuse to enter the controversial public arenas when things are a bit hot to handle. But that constitutes no less a betrayal of their own oaths of office, namely, to serve truth above all.

(Tibor Machan, an adjunct scholar of the Mises Institute, teaches at the Argyros School of Business and Economics at Chapman University.)