The following is an excerpt from Bill Moyers’ new book, “Moyers on Democracy” (Doubleday, 2008).

Democracy in America is a series of narrow escapes, and we may be running out of luck. The reigning presumption about the American experience, as the historian Lawrence Goodwyn has written, is grounded in the idea of progress, the conviction that the present is “better” than the past and the future will bring even more improvement. For all of its shortcomings, we keep telling ourselves, “The system works.”

Now all bets are off. We have fallen under the spell of money, faction, and fear, and the great American experience in creating a different future together has been subjugated to individual cunning in the pursuit of wealth and power -and to the claims of empire, with its ravenous demands and stuporous distractions. A sense of political impotence pervades the country — a mass resignation defined by Goodwyn as “believing the dogma of ‘democracy’ on a superficial public level but not believing it privately.” We hold elections, knowing they are unlikely to bring the corporate state under popular control. There is considerable vigor at local levels, but it has not been translated into new vistas of social possibility or the political will to address our most intractable challenges. Hope no longer seems the operative dynamic of America, and without hope we lose the talent and drive to cooperate in the shaping of our destiny.

The earth we share as our common gift, to be passed on in good condition to our children’s children, is being despoiled. Private wealth is growing as public needs increase apace. Our Constitution is perilously close to being consigned to the valley of the shadow of death, betrayed by a powerful cabal of secrecy-obsessed authoritarians. Terms like “liberty” and “individual freedom” invoked by generations of Americans who battled to widen the 1787 promise to “promote the general welfare” have been perverted to create a government primarily dedicated to the welfare of the state and the political class that runs it. Yes, Virginia, there is a class war and ordinary people are losing it. It isn’t necessary to be a Jeremiah crying aloud to a sinful Jerusalem that the Lord is about to afflict them for their sins of idolatry, or Cassandra, making a nuisance of herself as she wanders around King Priam’s palace grounds wailing “The Greeks are coming.” Or Socrates, the gadfly, stinging the rump of power with jabs of truth. Or even Paul Revere, if horses were still in fashion. You need only be a reporter with your eyes open to see what’s happening to our democracy. I have been lucky enough to spend my adult life as a journalist, acquiring a priceless education in the ways of the world, actually getting paid to practice one of my craft’s essential imperatives: connect the dots.

The conclusion that we are in trouble is unavoidable. I report the assault on nature evidenced in coal mining that tears the tops off mountains and dumps them into rivers, sacrificing the health and lives of those in the river valleys to short-term profit, and I see a link between that process and the stock-market frenzy which scorns long-term investments — genuine savings — in favor of quick turnovers and speculative bubbles whose inevitable bursting leaves insiders with stuffed pockets and millions of small stockholders, pensioners, and employees out of work, out of luck, and out of hope.

And then I see a connection between those disasters and the repeal of sixty-year-old banking and securities regulations designed during the Great Depression to prevent exactly that kind of human and economic damage. Who pushed for the removal of that firewall? An administration and Congress who are the political marionettes of the speculators, and who are well rewarded for their efforts with indispensable campaign contributions. Even honorable opponents of the practice get trapped in the web of an electoral system that effectively limits competition to those who can afford to spend millions in their run for office. Like it or not, candidates know that the largesse on which their political futures depend will last only as long as their votes are satisfactory to the sleek “bundlers” who turn the spigots of cash on and off.

The property qualifications for federal office that the framers of the Constitution expressly chose to exclude for demonstrating an unseemly “veneration for wealth” are now de facto in force and higher than the Founding Fathers could have imagined. “Money rules Our laws are the output of a system which clothes rascals in robes and honesty in rags. The parties lie to us and the political speakers mislead us.” Those words were spoken by Populist orator Mary Elizabeth Lease during the prairie revolt that swept the Great Plains slightly more than 120 years after the Constitution was signed. They are true today, and that too, spells trouble.

Then I draw a line to the statistics that show real wages lagging behind prices, the compensation of corporate barons soaring to heights unequaled anywhere among industrialized democracies, the relentless cheeseparing of federal funds devoted to public schools, to retraining for workers whose jobs have been exported, and to programs of food assistance and health care for poor children, all of which snatch away the ladder by which Americans with scant means but willing hands and hearts could work and save their way upward to middle-class independence. And I connect those numbers to our triumphant reactionaries’ campaigns against labor unions and higher minimum wages, and to their success in reframing the tax codes so as to strip them of their progressive character, laying the burdens of Atlas on a shrinking middle class awash in credit card debt as wage earners struggle to keep up with rising costs for health care, for college tuitions, for affordable housing — while huge inheritances go untouched, tax shelters abroad are legalized, rates on capital gains are slashed, and the rich get richer and with each increase in their wealth are able to buy themselves more influence over those who make and those who carry out the laws.

Edward R. Murrow told his generation of journalists: “No one can eliminate prejudices — just recognize them.” Here is my bias: extremes of wealth and poverty cannot be reconciled with a genuinely democratic politics. When the state becomes the guardian of power and privilege to the neglect of justice for the people as a whole, it mocks the very concept of government as proclaimed in the preamble to our Constitution; mocks Lincoln’s sacred belief in “government of the people, by the people, and for the people”; mocks the democratic notion of government as “a voluntary union for the common good” embodied in the great wave of reform that produced the Progressive Era and the two Roosevelts. In contrast, the philosophy popularized in the last quarter century that “freedom” simply means freedom to choose among competing brands of consumer goods, that taxes are an unfair theft from the pockets of the successful to reward the incompetent, and that the market will meet all human needs while government itself becomes the enabler of privilege — the philosophy of an earlier social Darwinism and laissez-faire capitalism dressed in new togs — is as subversive as Benedict Arnold’s betrayal of the Revolution he had once served. Again, Mary Lease: “The great evils which are cursing American society and undermining the foundations of the republic flow not from the legitimate operation of the great human government which our fathers gave us, but they come from tramping its plain provisions underfoot.”

[Read the rest HERE]

~

Posted: May 19th, 2008 under Bill Moyers, Books.
Comments: 2

When I started my part time bookstore job last month, I began to hear anecdotes from my fellow booksellers about customer habits, quirks and trends.  One such discussion concerned customer complaints about which books we stock and which books we don’t.   

I was unsurprised to learn that we regularly get complaints from customers who think that we don’t carry enough “conservative” titles.  Thinking there must also be corresponding complaints from the other side of the aisle, I asked “But what about on the flip side?”  To which my colleague answered “Oh yeah, we also get those same customers complaining that we carry too many ‘liberal” titles.”     

That’s as fair and balanced as it gets, folks.  Complaints, complaints, who’s got complaints? Let’s start with these guys…

From the New York Times:

Conservative Authors Sue Publisher

By MOTOKO RICH
Published: November 7, 2007

Five authors have sued the parent company of Regnery Publishing, a Washington imprint of conservative books, charging that the company deprives its writers of royalties by selling their books at a steep discount to book clubs and other organizations owned by the same parent company.

In a suit filed in United States District Court in Washington yesterday, the authors Jerome R. Corsi, Bill Gertz, Lt. Col. Robert (Buzz) Patterson, Joel Mowbray and Richard Miniter state that Eagle Publishing, which owns Regnery, “orchestrates and participates in a fraudulent, deceptively concealed and self-dealing scheme to divert book sales away from retail outlets and to wholly owned subsidiary organizations within the Eagle conglomerate.”

Some of the authors’ books have appeared on the New York Times best-seller list, including “Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry,” by Mr. Corsi and John E. O’Neill (who is not a plaintiff in the suit), Mr. Patterson’s “Dereliction of Duty: The Eyewitness Account of How Bill Clinton Compromised America’s National Security” and Mr. Miniter’s “Shadow War: The Untold Story of How Bush Is Winning the War on Terror.” In the lawsuit the authors say that Eagle sells or gives away copies of their books to book clubs, newsletters and other organizations owned by Eagle “to avoid or substantially reduce royalty payments to authors.”

Among other reasons.   Duh.  There’s certainly no way Eagle/Regnery could ever get rid of their toxic little screeds by actually selling them  in a bookstore or an online retailer.  I mean,  come on.  Who buys this crap? And when they do, who pays retail?   In fact, I’d be willing to bet that many of the “book clubs” and “other organizations” mentioned here are nothing more than truckloads of Eagle/Regnery books discreetly dumped in out of the way landfills.   

The authors argue that in reducing royalty payments, the publisher is maximizing its profits and the profits of its parent company at their expense.
“They’ve structured their business essentially as a scam and are defrauding their writers,” Mr. Miniter said in an interview, “causing a tremendous rift inside the conservative community.”

And that “tremendous rift inside the conservative community” is — where?   Unless he means that huge schism between the authoritarian-follower wingnuts and the knuckledragging freepers.

Traditionally, authors receive a 15 percent royalty based on the cover price of a hardcover title after they have sold enough copies to cover the cost of the advance they receive upon signing a contract with a publisher. (Authors whose books are sold at steep discounts or to companies that handle remaindered copies receive lower royalties.)

In Regnery’s case, according to the lawsuit, the publisher sells books to sister companies, including the Conservative Book Club, which then sells the books to members at discounted prices, “at, below or only marginally above its own cost of publication.” In the lawsuit the authors say they receive “little or no royalty” on these sales because their contracts specify that the publisher pays only 10 percent of the amount received by the publisher, minus costs — as opposed to 15 percent of the cover price — for the book.

Mr. Miniter said that meant that although he received about $4.25 a copy when his books sold in a bookstore or through an online retailer, he only earned about 10 cents a copy when his books sold through the Conservative Book Club or other Eagle-owned channels. “The difference between 10 cents and $4.25 is pretty large when you multiply it by 20,000 to 30,000 books,” Mr. Miniter said. “It suddenly occurred to us that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance.” He added: “Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?”

Oh, who cares what kind of a cartoon it is, as long as it’s this funny?

In an e-mail statement, Bruce W. Sanford, a lawyer with Baker Hostetler, a Washington firm representing Eagle and Regnery, said: “No publisher in America has a more acute marketing sense or successful track record at building promotional platforms for books than Regnery Publishing. These disgruntled authors object to marketing strategies used by all major book publishers that have proved successful time and again as witnessed by dozens of Regnery bestsellers.”

The authors also say in the lawsuit that Regnery donates books to nonprofit groups affiliated with Eagle Publishing and gives the books as incentives to subscribers to newsletters published by Eagle. The authors say they do not receive royalties for these books.

“You get 10 per cent of nothing because they basically give them away,” Mr. Patterson said in an interview.

The authors argue that because at least a quarter and as much as half of their book sales are diverted to nonretail channels, sales figures of their books on Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 70 percent of retail sales but does not reflect sales through book clubs and other outlets used by Eagle, are artificially low. Publishers use these figures when determining future book deals, and the authors argue that actions by Eagle and Regnery have long-term effects on their careers.

Mr. Miniter said that when he was negotiating a book deal with Threshold Editions, a conservative imprint of Simon & Schuster, he could have gotten a higher advance if BookScan reflected the true quantity of sales of his books.

Nullifidian explains just how ridiculous this is.

According to BookScan, Mr. Miniter’s “Shadow War” sold 46,000 copies in hardcover, and “Losing Bin Laden” sold 36,000 copies in hardback.

Careful what you wish for…  “Miniter’s temper tantrum gets redirected at Regnery. He wants them to stop bulk-ordering through retail, bringing the BookScan figures into line with the actual sales figures. However, this will only succeed in ensuring that nothing he writes ever again will get onto the NYT Bestseller list, and without that preliminary buzz, he won’t even get 36,000 next time—more like 10,000 if he’s lucky.”  

Mr. Miniter, who spearheaded the legal action, said he became aware of the discrepancies in royalty payments while defending a separate arbitration initiated by Regnery over a canceled contract. Mr. Miniter said that during the arbitration, which is pending, he saw royalty statements in which it appeared that about half his books’ sales had not gone through stores, and that his payments for those sales were much lower than the payments for bookstore sales. He contacted other Regnery authors and learned that they saw similar patterns on their royalty statements.

Joel Mowbray, author of “Dangerous Diplomacy: How the State Department Threatens America’s Security,” said he was particularly disappointed in Regnery and Eagle because they had so championed conservative authors. “These guys created the conservative book market,” Mr. Mowbray said. “Before them, conservatives were having to fight, generally unsuccessfully, to get books published.”

The authors, who say in the lawsuit that Eagle has been “unjustly enriched well in excess of one million dollars,” are seeking unspecified damages. But Mr. Miniter said, “We’re not looking for a payoff; we’re looking for justice.”

And what are we looking for? To paraphrase a little more from Nullifidian:  a bumper crop of shadenfreude at the expense of these poor little dears.  

Sweet. 

~~~

 

Posted: November 8th, 2007 under Books, It's a Bookshop, Wingnuttia.
Comments: none

A while back I found a book tucked in with some old atlases and maps on one of the many bookshelves that adorn the walls of the remote fortified family compound known as Tildebunkport…

A post-it note on the book said “Found with Gramma’s things” but I knew immediately that the book had to have come to us by way of one of the hub’s flea market expeditions. None of us ever called our grandmas “Gramma”, for one thing.

Grandma Dallelie was a registered nurse and Grandma Tild, while never formally trained in nursing, worked with the Red Cross for decades, and was a temperance activist to boot. Both women also had highly developed bullshit detectors, so I’m certain neither one of them would ever have allowed a book filled with such seductively pernicious claptrap in the house, much less kept it with her personal effects.

“What Your Neighbors Say” Dream Book (no copyright date, but probably published circa 1900)

About the book

About Dr. R.V. Pierce (from the Museum of Menstruation and Women’s Health)

excerpt from Substance and Shadow: Women and Addiction in the United States

More about Dr. Pierce, elected to the House of Representatives

More about Dr. Pierce, plus more about misdiagnosis and malpractice

A sampling of pages from “What Your Neighbors Say” Dream Book:

Diseases of Women, page 1

Diseases of Women, page 2

Oh! My! Such Pain!

How To Tell Unhealthy Urine By Its Appearance

A Healthy Woman Is Always Beautiful

Watch Your Daughter!

Healthy Mothers Have Healthy Children

UPDATE: Wondering what was in “Dr. Pierce’s Favorite Prescription”?

Although The Ladies’ Home Journal was not involved in the investigation of adulterated food, its muckraking into another issue helped bring about the same legislation–the Pure Food and Drug Act. The Journal’s campaign against the “patent medicine curse” was the best known of the muckraking in any of the woman’s magazines.[45] However, the Journal was not alone in its niche in uncovering the “evils” of the patent
medicine nostrums. Good Housekeeping also carried stories about the content of patent medicines.[46]   However, this campaign took a secondary position to food adulteration.  Both magazines extensively covered the problem from 1904 to 1906, when the Pure Food and Drug Act was passed.[47]

Both had the freedom to do so because neither accepted patent medicine advertising. The Journal carried the greater number of stories and devoted the more editorial space of the two to uncovering the abuses of the patent medicine industry.  Editor Edward Bok wrote most of the stories; and while clearly he was reporting facts, the largest number of these articles appeared on the Journal’s editorial page.   One of the first stories on the issue appeared in the May 1904 in an editorial, “The ‘Patent Medicine’ Curse,” and accompanying sidebar on the alcohol content of various brands of patent medicine. The results were startling. Richardson’s Concentrated Sherry Wine Bitters had 47.5 percent alcohol; Hostetter’s Stomach Bitters, 44.3 percent; Boker’s Stomach Bitters, 42.6 percent; Parker’s Tonic, “purely vegetable,” 41.6 percent.  Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound had relatively little–20.6 percent.[48]

Bok saw a real problem.  Women were doctoring themselves and their families with dangerous alcoholic nostrums.  Temperance women were turning to “bitters” to cure their sluggishness.  Pregnant women used “Doctor Pierce’s Favorite Prescription”, which contained digitalis, opium, oil of anise and alcohol (17 percent). [49].

Why Women Should Confide in Dr. Pierce

Oh, and men: lest you laugh too hard, thinking that Dr. Pierce spared your gender from scrutiny, consider…

“Spermatorrhea”
or the emission of semen without intercourse, including 1: wrecked manhood, wanton waste

..a selection from Dr. Pierce’s bestseller “The People’s Common Sense Medical Adviser; or, Medicine Explained” (63rd edition, 1895)

Well, enough hilarity. Funny; I think what I could really use right now is a drink.

~

Posted: October 25th, 2007 under Being Female, Books, Patent Medicine, R.V. Pierce, Women's Health.
Comments: 1

Climbing the Mississippi River Bridge by Bridge: Volume 2: Minnesota
by Mary Charlotte Aubry Costello

 

When an elementary school art teacher in Davenport, Iowa instructed her fifth grade students to study and sketch the local Mississippi River bridges one semester, probably neither the teacher nor her students nor anyone else had any inkling that a decades-long labor of love was about to begin. 

Mary Charlotte Aubry Costello’s fascination with the Mississippi River and especially its hundreds of bridges continued after her fifth graders’ study unit ended.   A few years later when she took early retirement, Costello gathered up her sketchbooks and art supplies and a camera and embarked on a quest:  to sketch every bridge across the Mississippi River, from the Louisiana delta all the way north to the headwaters in Lake Itasca.

During the course of her many trips  south and north from her Iowa home, Costello not only sketched the bridges but also collected as much information about them as she could. She spoke to engineers, DOT personnel, bridge designers, construction workers, railroad administrators, bridge-tenders, historians, and citizens who lived along the river.  She wrote down bridge histories from newspaper articles, railroad companies, the Coast Guard, and the Army Corps of Engineers.

In 1995, nearly twenty years after Costello set out on her expedition of discovery, the first of two volumes of her artwork was published:

Climbing the Mississippi River Bridge By Bridge, Volume 1(from Louisiana to Minnesota)

Seven years later, in 2002 Volume 2 was published, containing sketches of all 135 of Minnesota’s Mississippi River bridges. 

By coincidence, Mister Tild checked out Volume 2 from the Eden Prairie Library about a week before the I-35W bridge collapsed.    In the weeks after the collapse,  when it came time to either return the book to the library or renew it, we finally realized what we had in Costello’s comprehensive compendium of bridge information. We turned to the entry for ”Bridge 39″,  ie: Minnesota’s 39th bridge across the Mississippi as you travel north from the Iowa border:

For each of the 135 bridges in Volume 2, Costello has included a paragraph or two of background information.  It’s impossible to miss the irony in the last lines about Bridge 39:

  

Oddly, in the aftermath of the bridge collapse there’s been no sudden spike of interest in these books.  When I looked in the Hennepin County Library catalog last week, most of the 14 copies of Volume 2 that are in the system were checked in.  

The fruits of Mary Charlotte Aubry Costello’s labor of love have been widely praised by historians, bridge designers and engineers.  Both volumes of Climbing the Mississippi River Bridge By Bridge are cited often in Wikipedia entries and other reference works.  Complete with a glossary of bridge terms, descriptions  and diagrams of different types of bridges, these volumes are essential reading for anyone who wants to know more about our bridges’ past, present, and possible futures.

~

  

Posted: October 1st, 2007 under Books, I-35W Bridge Collapse, Mary Charlotte Aubry Costello, the Reading Room.
Comments: none

Two articles about Naomi Klein’s new book The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism.

Why Can’t the U.S. Have the Debate about Naomi Klein’s Book That Europe Has?

By Jan Frel, AlterNet. Posted September 21, 2007.

Naomi Klein’s new book, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, tells the history of how the American version of “free market” capitalism has spread in moments of crisis and catastrophe, when societies are too traumatized and disoriented to challenge the introduction of radical economic policies that go against their own interests.

The Shock Doctrine has already been published and translated in several countries. Excerpts from Klein’s book were published in the British newspaper, The Guardian, and discussion about the book has raged onThe Guardian’s online site, Comment Is Free as well as in the German, French and Canadian press. I attended Klein’s U.S. book launch event at the New York Society for Ethical Culture on September 17 where she described her work and her experiences dealing with a foreign press frequently hostile to her arguments.

At least the foreign press is willing to tangle with writers who offer critiques the capitalist system. There is plenty of economic coverage in the U.S., but fundamental questions on issues such as whether privatization of public assets benefits the public and if the focus on short-term economic growth is harmful in the long run are simply not discussed. I wondered how Klein’s book, which has hit the best-seller lists all over Europe, would fare in the U.S. and what Klein’s expectations were for the U.S. audience. I spoke with her on the phone about this and the issues she raises in The Shock Doctrine on September 19.

Jan Frel: Your book has 70 pages of footnotes and has citations from over 1,000 sources. At the book launch in New York, you referred to this as your “body armor.” The thinking seems to be that if you can back up what you’re saying, then it has to be accepted. Is this what will give it legitimacy in the mainstream media?

Naomi Klein: It’s more for the debate about my work. In the attempts to dismiss my work as conspiracies theories, the footnotes help.

Frel: It’s often times the case that books that make powerful and damning claims with complete accuracy still don’t break into public debate or hit the audience that ought to confront them. Isn’t there something else that prevents radical interpretations of society and economics and buried history from reaching public debate?

Klein: I think that’s true — it’s certainly true in this country. I wasn’t talking about the problem my book would have getting into the mainstream; it’s more about the debates around it. My books do get into the mainstream — outside the U.S. That doesn’t mean they aren’t contested, but in Canada for example, The Shock Doctrine is already at No. 3 on Amazon. [Currently at No. 43 in the United States.]

Another book I did, No Logo, was a mainstream book in most of the countries where it was published, except for the U.S. In the U.S. it never was. The context I talked about the need for support for my arguments is in cases where my book is being debated and argued. So in the U.S., I totally agree that having solid footnotes are no guarantee that you can start a mainstream debate. I don’t have any confidence that this book will be in the mainstream debate in the United States.

Frel: A lot of what you’re taking on in The Shock Doctrine is a concept that is fused in deep into a big part of the American psyche — that “the free market” and “free enterprise,” which we don’t typically debate or condemn in the mainstream but are to blame for a lot of the things the public does discern as problems, like our healthcare system. But how do you get people to see that they are being screwed by their own dominant economic beliefs?

Klein: It’s actually not that hard. The hard part is getting past the media wall.

Frel: At your U.S. book launch on Monday you talked about getting past the “intellectual police lines” that prevent discussion.

Read it all HERE

~~~

Can Radical Capitalism Survive the Disasters It Creates?

By John Gray, The Guardian. Posted September 22, 2007.

The era of “free market” economic policies forced on societies after disasters happen as detailed in Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine may be on the verge of ending.

Over the past few decades, many of the ideas of the far left have found new homes on the right. Lenin believed that it was in conditions of catastrophic upheaval that humanity advances most rapidly, and the idea that economic progress can be achieved through the devastation of entire societies has been a key part of the neo-liberal cult of the free market. Soviet-style economies left an inheritance of human and ecological devastation, while neo-liberal policies have had results that are not radically dissimilar in many countries. Yet, while the Marxist faith in central planning is now confined to a few dingy sects, a quasi-religious belief in free markets continues to shape the policies of governments.

Many writers have pointed to the havoc and ruin that have accompanied the imposition of free markets across the world. Whether in Africa, Asia, Latin America or post-communist Europe, policies of wholesale privatisation and structural adjustment have led to declining economic activity and social dislocation on a massive scale. Anyone who has watched a country lurch from one crisis to another as the bureaucrats of the IMF impose cut after cut in pursuit of the holy grail of stabilisation will recognise the process Naomi Klein describes in her latest and most important book to date. Visiting Argentina not long before the economic collapse of 2002, I found the government struggling to implement an IMF diktat to roll back public spending at a time when the economy was already rapidly contracting. The result was predictable, and the country was plunged into a depression, with calamitous consequences in terms of poverty and social breakdown.

Klein believes that neo-liberalism belongs among “the closed, fundamentalist doctrines that cannot co-exist with other belief-systems … The world as it is must be erased to make way for their purist invention. Rooted in biblical fantasies of great floods and great fires, it is a logic that leads ineluctably towards violence.” As Klein sees it, the social breakdowns that have accompanied neo-liberal economic policies are not the result of
incompetence or mismanagement. They are integral to the free-market project, which can only advance against a background of disasters. At times, writing in a populist vein that echoes her first book No Logo, published seven years ago, Klein seems to suggest that these disasters are manufactured as part of a deliberate policy framed by corporations with hidden influence in government. Her more considered view, which is also more plausible, is that disaster is part of the normal functioning of the type of capitalism we have today: “An economic system that requires constant growth, while bucking almost all serious attempts at environmental regulation, generates a steady stream of disasters all on its own, whether military, ecological or financial. The appetite for easy, short-term profits offered by purely speculative investment has turned the stock, currency and real estate markets into crisis-creation machines, as the Asian financial crisis, the Mexican peso crisis and the dotcom collapse all demonstrate.”

Read it all HERE

~~~

ADDED:

Naomi Klein Debates Alan Greenspan

by Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!. Posted September 25, 2007.

Naomi Klein goes head to head with Alan Greenspan on the Iraq war, Bush’s tax cuts, economic populism, crony capitalism and more

AMY GOODMAN: As the credit crisis continues to grow and the US dollar hits a new low, we turn today to the former Chair of the Federal Reserve, Alan Greenspan. Alan Greenspan headed the central bank in the United States for almost two decades. He was first appointed to this position in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan. Greenspan retired in January 2006, after deciding the fate of national interest rates under four different presidents. Dubbed “the Maestro,” he was widely regarded as one of the world’s most influential economic policymakers. He has just written a new 500-page memoir; it’s called The Age of Turbulence: Adventures in a New World.Alan Greenspan joins us now on the phone. And in our studio we’re joined again by journalist Naomi Klein, author of The Shock Doctrine. We welcome you both to Democracy Now! Welcome, Alan Greenspan.

ALAN GREENSPAN: Thank you very much. I’m delighted.AMY GOODMAN: It’s good to have you with us. You worked with six presidents, with President Reagan, with both President Bushes. You worked with President Ford, and you worked with Bill Clinton, who you have called a Republican president; why?

ALAN GREENSPAN: That was supposed to be a quasi-joke.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk about it.

ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, Clinton?

AMY GOODMAN: Yes.

ALAN GREENSPAN: Well, I stated that I’m a libertarian Republican, which means I believe in a series of issues, such as smaller government, constraint on budget deficits, free markets, globalization, and a whole series of other things, including welfare reform. And as you may remember, Bill Clinton was pretty much in the same — was doing much that same agenda. And so, I got to consider him as someone — as he described it, we were both an odd couple, because he is a centrist Democrat. And that’s not all that far from libertarian Republicanism.

AMY GOODMAN: About how much would you say you agreed with him?

ALAN GREENSPAN: On economic issues, I would say probably 80 percent.

AMY GOODMAN: And what about President Bush?

ALAN GREENSPAN: President Bush had the wonderful characteristic of knowing that it was not to his advantage or to ours to interfere with the actions of the Federal Reserve. And I must say, through all of his years, he never once second-guessed what the Fed was doing. And that was very important to us, and we’ve been very much appreciative of that.

But, as I say in the book, he did not clamp down, as I thought was necessary, on what was a wayward Republican-controlled Congress, which I thought lost its way and started to spend and create all sorts of fiscal imbalances. And, essentially, what I hold — where I thought the administration could have done far better is if the veto were employed. And as you may remember, he did not use the veto at all. And that, what I thought, would have created a much more balanced procedure in the Congress. So it’s a mixed case in this regard.

AMY GOODMAN: Alan Greenspan, let’s talk about the war in Iraq. You said what for many in your circles is the unspeakable, that the war in Iraq was for oil. Can you explain?

Read the rest HERE

~

Posted: September 25th, 2007 under Alan Greenspan, Books, Economics, Naomi Klein.
Comments: 1

Tild sez:   The responsibility for economic policies enacted in the past 27 years that have targeted working class America for destruction needs to be laid exactly where it belongs: on the right’s beloved Saint Ronald fucking Reagan.  A new book by Dean Baker takes some big strides towards that end… 

America Since 1980: A Right Turn Leading to a Dead End

By Dean Baker, AlterNet. Posted April 27, 2007.

Economist Dean Baker’s new book lays waste to the Reagan Revolution’s unprecedented assault on working Americans’ economic security.

Editor’s note: this is adapted from Dean Baker’s new book, The United States since 1980 (The World Since 1980).

U.S. politics took a sharp turn to the right in 1980 with the election of Ronald Reagan as president. Domestically, Reagan touted an agenda that would lead to a sharp upward redistribution of income. Internationally, Reagan explicitly rejected the “détente” framework for engaging the Soviet Union that had been accepted by the leadership of both major parties since the beginning of the Cold War. In its place, Reagan put forward a doctrine of U.S. unilateralism in which the United States basically claimed the right to do whatever it wanted, unconstrained by allies or international institutions.

The welfare state in the United States was always weaker than in West Europe, but in 1980 it was reasonable to believe that West Europe presented a model that the United States would follow. Medicare and Medicaid were still relatively new programs, having been established just 14 years earlier. Having recently seen a massive expansion of publicly provided healthcare coverage, many people believed that it would not be long before healthcare coverage was extended to the entire population. Other features of European welfare states, such as long vacations, short work weeks, and paid parental leave (generally maternity leave at the time), also seemed feasible political goals.

Reagan’s election changed the political reality. His agenda was rolling back the welfare state, and his budgets included a wide range of cuts for social programs. He was also very strategic about the process. One of his first targets was Legal Aid. This program, which provides legal services for low-income people, was staffed largely by progressive lawyers, many of whom used it as a base to win precedent-setting legal disputes against the government. Reagan drastically cut back the program’s funding. He also explicitly prohibited the agency from taking on class-action suits against the government — law suits that had been used with considerable success to expand the rights of low- and moderate-income families.

The Reagan administration also made weakening the power of unions a top priority. The people he appointed to the National Labor Relations Board were qualitatively more pro-management than appointees by prior Democratic or Republican presidents. This allowed companies to ignore workers’ rights with impunity. Reagan also made the firing of strikers an acceptable business practice when he fired striking air traffic controllers in 1981. Many large corporations quickly embraced the practice. Also, his high dollar policy in the mid-’80s was a severe blow to manufacturing unions, who suddenly had to compete against low-cost imports that were essentially subsidized by an overvalued dollar.

The net effect of these policies was that union membership plummeted, going from nearly 20 percent of the private sector workforce in 1980 to just over 7 percent in 2006. Inequality soared, as the vast majority of the gains from economic growth over the next quarter century went to high-end wage earners (e.g., doctors, lawyers, CEOs) and profits. The wages of typical workers increased little from 1980 to 2006.

On the international side, Reagan followed through on his campaign promise to reject the arms control agreements that previous administrations had negotiated with the Soviets. He insisted on going back to the drawing board and negotiating proposals for arms reduction, not just freezes. While Reagan eventually found a more accommodating enemy than he had anticipated when Mikhail Gorbachev came to power in the Soviet Union, his belligerence towards the Soviet Union was a deliberate break with prior administrations.

[Read the whole article here]

 

Posted: April 27th, 2007 under Books, General, Reaganomics.
Comments: none

Kurt Vonnegut died yesterday at the age of 84.

I know I’m just one of a multitude saying it, but I have to say that this news leaves me very sad.  

Actually I’m only familiar with a few of his books: 

Mother Night

Wampeters, Foma and Granfalloons 

Slaughterhouse Five

and, my first encounter with him:

The Sirens of Titan

..which I read when I was 13, and which led me to conclude that Vonnegut must be the most psychotic SF author of all time.  It took me ten years to get over that first impression, but when I did, I embraced the madman and never looked back. 

Until today, that is, when we might all benefit from reading an essay Kurt Vonnegut wrote in 1971:

~~~

June 30, 1971

TORTURE AND BLUBBER

By KURT VONNEGUT Jr.

West Barnstable, Mass.,–When I was a young reader of Robin Hood tales and “The White Company” by Arthur Conan Doyle and so on, I came across the verb “blubber” so often that I looked it up. Bad people in the stories did it when good people punished them hard. It means, of course, to weep noisily and without constraint. No good person in a story ever did that.

But it is not easy in real life to make a healthy man blubber, no matter how wicked he may be. So good men have invented appliances which make unconstrained weeping easier–the rack, the boot, the iron maiden, the pediwinkis, the electric chair, the cross, the thumbscrew. And the thumbscrew is alluded to in the published parts of the secret Pentagon history of the Vietnam war.

The late Assistant Secretary of Defense, John McNaughton, speaks of each bombing of the North as “. . .one more turn of the screw.”

Simply: we are torturers, and we once hoped to win in Indochina and anywhere because we had the most expensive torture instruments yet devised. I am reminded of the Spanish Armada, whose ships had torture chambers in their holds. Protestant Englishmen were going to be forced to blubber.

The Englishmen refused.

Now the North Vietnamese and the Vietcong have refused. Plenty of them have blubbered like crazy as individuals, God knows–when splattered with jellied gasoline, when peppered with white phosphorus, when crammed into tiger cages and sprinkled with lime. But their societies fight on.

Agony never made a society quit fighting, as far as I know. A society has to be captured or killed–or offered things it values. While Germany was being tortured during the Second World War, with justice, may I add, its industrial output and the determination of its people increased. Hitler, according to Albert Speer, couldn’t even be bothered with marveling at the ruins or comforting the survivors. The Biafrans were tortured simultaneously by Nigerians, Russians and British. Their children starved to death. The adults were skeletons. But they fought on.

One wonders now where our leaders got the idea that mass torture would work to our advantage in Indochina. It never worked anywhere else. They got the idea from childish fiction, I think, and from a childish awe of torture.

Children talk about tortures a lot. They often make up what they hope are new ones. I can remember a friend’s saying to me when I was a child: “You want to hear a really neat torture?” The other day I heard a child say to another: “You want to hear a really cool torture?” And then an impossibly complicated engine of pain was described. A cross would be cheaper, and work better, too.

But children believe that pain is an effective way of controlling people, which it isn’t–except in a localized, short-term sense. They believe that pain can change minds, which it can’t. Now the secret Pentagon history reveals that plenty of high-powered American adults think so, too, some of them college professors. Shame on them for their ignorance.

Torture from the air was the only military scheme open to us, I suppose, since the extermination or capture of the North Vietnamese people would have started World War III. In which case, we would have been tortured from the air.

I am sorry we tried torture, I am sorry we tried anything. I hope we will never try torture again. It doesn’t work. Human beings are stubborn and brave animals everywhere. They can endure amazing amounts of pain, if they have to. The North Vietnamese and the Vietcong have had to.

Good show.

The American armada to Indochina has been as narrow-minded and futile as the Spanish Armada to England was, though effectively more cruel. Only 27,000 men were involved in the Spanish fiasco. We are said to have more dope addicts than that in Vietnam.  Hail, Victory.

Never mind who the American equivalent of Spain’s Philip II was. Never mind who lied. Everybody should shut up for a while. Let there be deathly silence as our armada sails home.

 

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. is the author of “Slaughterhouse-Five,” “Cat’s Cradle” and other novels.

[New York Times, June 1971]  

~~~ 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted: April 12th, 2007 under Books, General, Kurt Vonnegut, Torture, the Reading Room.
Comments: none

(via PZ) Here’s a list of The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years.

When I first looked it over I couldn’t believe how many of these books I have NOT read. Shocking. For example: I have not read Sword of Shannara. Tsk, and I call myself an SF&F fan!

Here’s the list marked up to show what I’ve read and what I haven’t. I’m sticking with tikistitch’s markup method, which cannot be improved upon:

Bold = I’ve read ‘em

Italic = I read the first three chapters and now they’re in a box somewhere

Times font = author is douchebag

 

The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien

The Foundation Trilogy, Isaac Asimov

Dune, Frank Herbert

Stranger in a Strange Land, Robert A. Heinlein

A Wizard of Earthsea, Ursula K. Le Guin

Neuromancer, William Gibson

Childhood’s End, Arthur C. Clarke

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Philip K. Dick

The Mists of Avalon, Marion Zimmer Bradley

Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury

The Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe

A Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter M. Miller, Jr.

The Caves of Steel, Isaac Asimov

Children of the Atom, Wilmar Shiras

Cities in Flight, James Blish

The Colour of Magic, Terry Pratchett

Dangerous Visions, edited by Harlan Ellison

Deathbird Stories, Harlan Ellison

The Demolished Man, Alfred Bester

Dhalgren, Samuel R. Delany

Dragonflight, Anne McCaffrey

Ender’s Game, Orson Scott Card

The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, Stephen R. Donaldson

The Forever War, Joe Haldeman

Gateway, Frederik Pohl

Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, J.K. Rowling

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Douglas Adams

I Am Legend, Richard Matheson

Interview with the Vampire, Anne Rice

The Left Hand of Darkness, Ursula K. Le Guin

Little, Big, John Crowley

Lord of Light, Roger Zelazny

The Man in the High Castle, Philip K. Dick

Mission of Gravity, Hal Clement

More Than Human, Theodore Sturgeon

The Rediscovery of Man, Cordwainer Smith

On the Beach, Nevil Shute

Rendezvous with Rama, Arthur C. Clarke

Ringworld, Larry Niven

Rogue Moon, Algis Budrys

The Silmarillion, J.R.R. Tolkien

Slaughterhouse-5, Kurt Vonnegut

Snow Crash, Neal Stephenson

Stand on Zanzibar, John Brunner

The Stars My Destination, Alfred Bester

Starship Troopers, Robert A. Heinlein

Stormbringer, Michael Moorcock

The Sword of Shannara, Terry Brooks

Timescape, Gregory Benford

To Your Scattered Bodies Go, Philip Jose Farmer

 

Posted: March 12th, 2007 under Books, General, Science Fiction, the Reading Room.
Comments: 11

It took me two– count’em –TWO hours yesterday to traverse the 20+/- miles from Tildebunkport to Nordeast for the weekly DL festivities. Gaaah. Then once I finally got there the 331 Club seemed even more crowded than usual: the rain kept everyone inside, and it was the farewell (for the season) performance of club fave raves