Europe and the Benefits of Greening the Economy

Great article in Mother Jones about the impact that environmental regulations have had in the European Union. The overall costs of going green (or at least greener) have not been as high as was feared, and there is job/industry growth in green technology.

Foreclosure Phil

"Years before Phil Gramm was a McCain campaign adviser and a lobbyist for a Swiss bank at the center of the housing credit crisis, he pulled a sly maneuver in the Senate that helped create today's subprime meltdown."

This is a really important story, because Gramm is one of McCain's closest advisors on the economy, and a likely pick for a major office in a McCain administration.

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Book Review: Right Is Wrong by Arianna Huffington

Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe

Arianna Huffington

politics, current affairs. republican party, george w. bush, john mccain

Huffington is the founder of one of the most widely read political blogs, The Huffington Post. She is a native of Greece, but has been an enthusiastic participant in politics in this country for many years. She started as a Republican, and one of the more interesting parts of Right Is Wrong is her discussion of why she was Republican and what changed her. She was a Republican because she believed in limited government, that private sources were the best remedies for society's ills. She was always concerned with issues of helping the poor, and thought that many Republicans were as well. She left the Republican party after Newt Gingrich heard her ideas on helping the poor and said that they were the kind of ideas Republicans needed. It wasn't long before she realized that he was not actually interested in helping the poor but in the appearance of doing so. She also "...came to recognize that the task of overcoming poverty is too monumental to be achieved without the raw power of annual appropriations." (p. 9) Since then, she says that many of her friends who are Republican have become bewildered by the direction of the Party. So the book is about how the fringe elements took over the GOP and hijacked its principles. After a couple of chapters on the pitiful state of the media now (including an honor roll of the few journalists who were right, and reporting what they knew, in the run-up to the Iraq war (which fits well with the episode of Bill Moyer's Journal called "Buying the War"), Huffington goes into a litany of the insanities of the George W. Bush administration. She covers everything from a bad energy bill to the politicization of science to the Iraq war to the failure in Afghanistan, to torture, to immigration, to the recession, to the state of health care, to the end of the ban on assault weapons. It is sickening, but not all that new. Her main point for repeating all of this is to reinforce it in the public's mind in this crucial election, and to show how electing John McCain would be a continuation of Bush's failed policies. It seems that the policies and behavior of McCain since he decided to run for President this time have been a major disappointment to Huffington. She has known, worked with, and admired John McCain in the past, but lays out how his positions have changed to pander to the people who can make him President. Most tragic of all is his change of position on torture, from saying that one of the things that kept him going during his own torture was knowing that his country would not do anything of the sort, to his recent vote to not extend prohibitions on torture to the CIA. It is an important book and an important message. Presidents don't always act in office as they promise on the campaign trail. George W. Bush is an example, he ran as a moderate in 2000 and then governed from somewhere right of the Neanderthals. But we can't take a chance on a McCain presidency for so many reasons, starting with the composition of the Supreme Court under a President McCain. One of the interesting pieces to me is in her discussion of the politicization of the Justice Department and the firing of the eight U.S. attorneys. Four of the eight fired were looking into corruption charges against Republicans. This is an interesting bit on Rove's involvement: "Unraveling the cover-ups revealed that the the evidence trail on the firings went all the way to the White House. In an interview with MCClatchy newspapers, Alan Weh, chairman of the New Mexico Republican party, admitted that, in 2005, he asked a White Hose staffer who worked for Karl Rove for help in getting rid of New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias. Weh, unhappy that Iglesias refused to rush a showy investigation of Democratic officials in time for the 2006 election, followed up directly with Rove in 2006. According to Weh, his conversation with the Boy Genius went something like this: Weh: is anything ever going to happen to that guy [Iglesias]? Rove: He's gone." (p. 300) The 2008 Presidential election is the most important in a generation. Arianna Huffington is doing what she can to see that citizens go into the voting booth knowing the stakes involved.

Knopf (2008), Edition: 1, Hardcover, 400 pages

2008

0307269663 / 9780307269669

Incredible and important book: Naomi Klein's The Shock Doctine

Here's my entry for Naomi Kline's new book The Shock Doctrine in Library Thing:

Title	The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism
Author Klein, Naomi	Naomi Klein
Rating
Tags	disaster-capitalism milton_friedman chicago-school free_markets imf world_bank latin_america iraq israel tsunami new_orleans ewen_cameron torture russia china chile argentina bolivia
Your review	This is literally a life-changing book. After reading it, one's view of the world is changed forever, and the world suddenly makes sense in a way it never did before. What was inexplicable suddenly comes into sharp focus, and random evil now has a purpose and goal, and with that understanding comes the possibility of change. The book is about the Chicago School of Economics and its guru, Milton Friedman, and their effect on the world. Friedman advocated radically free markets. He called such markets pure, and stated that any government interference in the market corrupts it. Therefore he called for privatization of government assets, freedom from government regulations, and from trade barriers. Friedman's views were a response to the views of John Maynard Keynes, the economist behind the post WW II reconstruction efforts of Europe and Japan. The problem was that Friedman's vision of pure and free markets was not appealing to any but the wealthy; it seemed to offer few benefits to the middle and lower classes, the majority of voters in a democracy. So Friedman had difficulty getting any government to adopt his ideas. Enter the research of Ewen Cameron, a psychiatrist with impressive credentials. He believed that to create healthy new behaviors in patients he had to break up their old psychological patterns by breaking down their current structures. To do this , he used electroshock and drugs, including hallucinogens, and other techniques to "de-pattern" his patients. Many lost their memories and some became incapable of functioning normally... but the CIA became interested in the techniques as a method of mind control. Cameron's techniques, including isolation and sensory deprivation, became instruments of torture: "As a means of extracting information during interrogations, torture is notoriously unreliable, but as means of terrorizing and controlling populations, nothing is quite as effective" (p. 126). "It was in 1982 that Milton Friedman wrote the highly influential passage that best summarizes the shock doctrine: "Only a crisis -real or perceived - produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believed, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable." (p. 140) Crisis could create opportunity for drastic new measures to be introduced quickly, to cause such shock among the populace that they were incapable of acting counter to the new policies. So the ideas of Cameron and Friedman merged to exploit or create shocks that would allow governments to pursue doctrines that would never succeed democratically. The first true laboratory for the shock doctrine was the Pinochet coup in Chile against Allende, a coup backed by the CIA. "The shock of the coup prepared the ground for economic shock therapy; the shock of the torture chamber terrorized anyone thinking of standing in the way of the economic shocks." (p. 71). There has to be a warning that this book will at times make the reader sick to his/her stomach... there are graphic depictions of torture. Yet the horror is not gratuitous, it is vital to understanding all that happened. The Chicago school triumphed in country after country, especially after they captured the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, those institutions ironically set up to carry out Keynesian ideas of reconstruction after disaster. The results in so many countries were the same. A small core of native elites and multinational companies profited enormously. But the percentage of the people living in poverty rose drastically, native industries disappeared, unable to compete, farms became bankrupt, unemployment soared and wages were depressed for those who still had a job. In South Africa and Poland, popular regimes elected to dismantle repressive regimes were forced to pay the debts of those old regimes, and to do so had to accept money from the IMF, with the attending requirements to adopt Friedman style economics. Much of the book is a detailed examination of the shock doctrine and its effects in country after country - the Southern Cone countries of Latin America, Poland, South Africa, Russia, China, Iraq, Israel... the list goes on and on. Finally the war in Iraq makes some sense: the idea was to "shock and awe" Iraq to create a tabula rasa, a clean slate upon which would be drawn a stable sound country, free economically and democratically, which would serve as a blueprint to remake the entire Middle East (it becomes clear that part of the draw of Islamic terrorist organizations, like the Mahdi Army and Hezbollah, is that these groups have provided basic services, like hospitals, schools, and garbage disposal, that governments were no longer providing). The shocks now even include natural disasters, with a disaster economy ready to go and to profit from them, perhaps most strikingly illustrated after the 2004 tsunami, when so many who relied on fishing for their living lost the beach front lands their families had owned for generations, to New Orleans, where public schools were not rebuilt and private schools became the norm. In Israel, the homeland security firms have become the backbone of the economy, driving a disinclination to secure peace. But in many places, especially Latin America where the shocks are beginning to wear off,. Such places are becoming resistant to further shock, having suffered the worst that shock could do. If you only read one book on current affairs, let it be this one. If you aren't interested in politics, manufacture an interest long enough to read this one book. Vital events are happening throughout the world that affect our lives, and the course this country decides to take for the future. Reading this book helps one to make informed decisions as a voter and citizen.
Other authors 1
Publication	Metropolitan Books (2007), Hardcover, 576 pages
Publication date	2007
ISBN	0805079831 / 9780805079838
LC classification
Dewey	330.122
Subjects	Capitalism Financial crises Free enterprise
Primary language	English
Original language
Date acquired
Date started
Date finished
Summary 1	The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein (2007)
Comments
Private comments
BCID	-
Number of copies	1
Citation	MLA, APA, Chicago/Turabian, Wikipedia citation
Entry date	2007-12-13
Data source	amazon.com