Tax and Spending Effects of Municipal Enterprises: The Case of Florida Electric Utilities

This study tests the appropriateness of two competing hypotheses drawn from the public finance literature about the impact of municipal utility profits on local tax and spending patterns. By comparing data from cities that own their electric utilities to nonelectric cities, this research finds that neither city expenditures nor property tax rates are significantly affected by the transfer of profits. The evidence suggests that the profits are used by cities with relatively weak tax bases to obtain revenues from tax-exempt institutions, homeowners, and nonresidents.     

"Business Unionism" versus "Responsible Unionism": Common Law Confusion, the American State, and the Formation of Pre-New Deal Labor Policy

The emergence of the American Federation of Labor in the 1880s and its ideology of voluntarism or "business unionism" transformed the mainstream American labor movement. Voluntarism, however, had little impact on the formation of the pre-New Deal labor policy. I suggest that members of the progressive movement developed "responsible unionism" as an alternative to "business unionism" and that it was the progressives' alternative that shaped later developments in labor policy. (1) Progressive state and federal court judges relied on the principles of agency, a fiduciary term, to make unions competent contracting parties and enforce collective trade agreements. (2) Although the AFL had long lobbied for anti-injunction legislation sup ported by an underlying ideology of voluntarism, the progressive Republican-Democratic coalition that engineered passage of the Norris-LaGuardia Anti-Injunction Act of 1932 based the legislation on their notion of "responsible unionism." These progressives interwove the principles of agency into the act. As a result, rather than withdrawing the American state from labor-management relations, the act caused unions to begin to lose their status as private, voluntary associations, thus creating the foundation for the construction of the statist regulatory apparatus, the National Labor Relations Board, during the New Deal.     

Ideologie,kultuur en hegemonie: Toerusting vir media-ontleding

SUMMARY

This paper has four aims. The first is to present the major tenets of an emergent paradigm in cultural studies by critically outlining the three main concepts of that paradigm, viz., ideology, culture and hegemony; secondly, to relate this paradigm to concerns in communication and media studies; thirdly, to establish some connections between this paradigm and some recent work done in this area in SA; and finally to indicate some of the new directions this paradigm is taking in current social theorizing.     

writing the terrorist self: the unspeakable alterity of Italy's female perpetrators

This paper examines texts written by, or in collaboration with, female ex-members of the Italian left-wing armed organization, the Red Brigades. The corpus differs from male-authored or male-centred texts in that issues relating to identity and selfhood lie at the very heart of the project of narrating the terrorist past; the primary concern of Italian women's post-terrorist narration is not to narrate the experience of belonging to an armed organization, but to construct a new identity distinct from a pre-existing self identified exclusively with the transgressive experience of political violence. I consider the corpus in the light of a number of critical problems posed both by the specificity of female perpetration and by the dearth of theoretical writings on perpetrator trauma more generally. I identify in each text an acute anxiety about the very act of speech or narration and find that, in order to circumvent the perceived prohibition on speech, the women of the Red Brigades subtly insinuate into their life writing a discourse of alterity bordering on subalternity that obscures the boundary between victim and perpetrator. The unacknowledged slippage between discourses of perpetration and victimization is explored in relation to Ruth Leys’ critique of Cathy Caruth's formulation of trauma as the wound that cries out through the voice of the victim. The paper concludes by questioning whether perpetrator trauma can ever be articulated as such and by considering the implications of that question for traumatized perpetrator and victimized society alike.     

The next Great Trek? South African commercial farmers move north

This paper analyses the shifting role of South African farmers, agribusiness and capital elsewhere in the Southern African region and the rest of the continent. It explores recent trends in this expansion, and investigates the interests and agendas shaping such deals, and the ideologies and discourses of legitimation employed in favour of them. While for the past two decades small numbers of South African farmers have moved to Mozambique, Zambia and several other countries, this trend seems to be undergoing both a quantitative and a qualitative shift. Whereas in the past their migration was largely individual or in small groups, now it is being more centrally organised and coordinated, is more frequently taking the form of large concessions for newly formed consortia and agribusinesses, and is increasingly reliant on external financing through transnational partnerships. By early 2010, the commercial farmers' association Agri South Africa (AgriSA) was engaged in negotiations for land acquisitions with the governments of 22 African countries. This essay is the product of a scoping study to document and analyse major land acquisitions by South African farmers and agribusinesses, and the processes through which these have occurred and are occurring. It considers the changing character, scale and location of South African investments elsewhere in the region and the continent, and focuses specifically on the AgriSA-Congo deal (the largest deal concluded thus far), and acquisitions by the two South African sugar giants, Illovo and Tongaat-Hulett, for outgrower and estate expansion elsewhere in the region. The study addresses the degree to which South Africa is no longer merely exporting its farmers, but also its value chains, to the rest of the continent – and what this means for trajectories of agrarian change. It questions how we might understand the growing trend of ‘intra-regional land grabbing’ and, in the cases discussed, suggests that South African-based companies are acting as arteries of global capital.     

No Future for Germany's Past? Collective Memory and German Foreign Policy

Like most aspects of German politics and society after 1945, post-war German foreign policy has traditionally been greatly influenced by the legacy of Germany's National Socialist past and the Second World War. The semi-sovereign and divided nature of the West German state along with the strong argumentative force of collective memory in foreign policy discourse ensured a strong presence of Germany's historical legacy in both institutional and discursive terms resulting in a foreign policy which was characterised by self-limitation, a strong commitment to multilateralism and a civilian foreign policy culture. This article will argue that the interpretation of German collective memory of the Holocaust and the Second World War underwent significant changes under the red–green governments between 1998 and 2005, in particular with regard to the use of force. Although German collective memory continued to be present during this period, it lost its predictability and was used in a variety of crises to justify a range of responses, including military action.