Book Reviews - Europe and Economics

These come courtesy of H-Net Reviews

Barry Eichengreen. The European Economy since 1945: Coordinated Capitalism and Beyond. The Princeton Economic History of the Western World. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007. 504 pp. ISBN 978-0-691-12710-1; $35.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-691-12710-1.

Reviewed by Frank B. (Ben) Tipton (Department of International Business, University of Sydney)
Published on H-German (March, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher

Eichengreen argues that for a very long

period Europe's institutional structures have remained constant. These "corporatist" or "neocorporatist" institutions, according to Eichengreen, have three components: industry associations representing employers, peak organizations representing workers, and national government agencies involved in economic planning. During the period of rapid growth governments channeled capital to industry. Unions moderated their wage demands in return for training and job stability offered by employers and social security programs offered by governments. These institutions worked well during the period of recovery following the war when it was necessary to target a range of interdependent industries simultaneously. They also worked well during the 1950s and 1960s, when Europeans could exploit technologies previously developed by the United States, a process Eichengreen idiosyncratically calls "extensive" growth (p. 6, n. 9). However, they have worked less well since the 1970s when it has become more necessary to apply innovative new technologies, which Eichengreen labels "intensive" growth. In this new period employers' associations have sought protection for declining industries, government bureaucrats have not been able to select among emerging technologies, and labor organizations have become impatient and pushed for higher wages and resisted cuts in welfare programs. European economies, relatively competitive in the 1950s and 1960s, became less competitive after the 1970s and have remained so. Currently, Eichengreen concludes, if there is no change in their corporatist institutions, Europeans face a bleak future: "[T]hese institutions, which were ideally suited to a period of extensive growth, must now be adapted to a new era" (p. 425).

***

Other problems plague Eichengreen's analysis as well. Growth and productivity did slow after 1970 in both western and eastern Europe, of course, but we still need to ask whether specific causes were to be found in European institutions, or whether the slowdown reflected broader trends in the world economy. As it happens, similar measures show a slowdown in both aggregate growth and productivity in both the United States and Japan in the early 1970s, and, as Eichengreen notes, the United States experienced extremely slow increases in productivity in the 1980s and early 1990s. But, if common outcomes have common causes, and if the institutional structures of Europe, Japan, and the United States were very different, then something else besides institutional variations must have caused the shared slowdown. A large literature derived from the work of 1920s Russian economist Nicolai Kondratieff places the upswing of the 1950s and 1960s and the downswing of the 1970s and 1980s in the context of long waves of economic development (for instance: A. Tylecote, The Long Wave and the World Economy: The Current Crisis in Historical Perspective [1993]), but Eichengreen does not cite these works even to refute them. The world economy could now be entering a new upswing based on information and communications technologies, but we do not know as yet. However, we do know that the improvement in United States productivity growth in the late 1990s was largely confined to the computer industry, retailing, and banking, while Europe has done better in telecommunications, and relatively better in automobiles, another set of facts that Eichengreen notes, but which sits uncomfortably with his blanket insistence that Europe's economies must adopt institutional structures more like those of the United States

***

Very few people enter Eichengreen's picture, except for the political leaders of Britain, France, and Germany, and some of the famous advocates of European unity. The only business executive mentioned by name may be Gerrit Wagner of Royal Dutch Shell, but only in his role as chair of a government committee that supported the reform program mentioned above. Eichengreen thinks entrepreneurs play a critical role in development and believes they should receive "lavish U.S.-style rewards" (p. 402), but although Joseph Schumpeter is cited (p. 154), no entrepreneurs appear. As Eichengreen notes, the venture capital industry is more highly developed in the United States than in Europe, and some European countries regulate new businesses quite heavily, but the European Union and individual countries support entrepreneurial small- and medium-sized enterprises with extensive schemes that Eichengreen does not consider. Consideration of the large literature on the definition, emergence, and variations in entrepreneurial behavior would have added depth to this part of the story.

Hans-Werner Sinn. Can Germany Be Saved?: The Malaise of the World's First Welfare State. Boston: MIT Press, 2007. xvi + 338 pp. ISBN 978-0-262-19558-4; $29.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-262-19558-4.

Reviewed by Georg Menz (Goldsmiths College, University of London)
Published on H-German (March, 2009)
Commissioned by Susan R. Boettcher


In the fall of 2008, more than thirty-six years after Chilean soldiers stormed the presidential palace in Santiago, sweeping away democratically elected president Salvador Allende and ushering in the status of this remote South American nation as the world's first test tube for an ideology pioneered by Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, the long-cherished wisdom of the supremacy of unregulated market forces was buried at last in the rubble of the disintegrating finance and banking landscape in the financial districts of New York City and London. Implemented, beloved, and even idolized by the Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan governments and by Western and non-Western policymakers around the globe, neoliberalism attracted an extraordinarily loyal following and radically recast the role of the state and the regulation of the market. For more than three decades, this approach had dominated the academic discipline of economics, and in Anglo-American countries it constituted the economic common sense for politicians of all stripes, lately even for those of the center-left parties.

***

It was always naïve to assume that Germany would remain immune to the siren calls of this reactionary doctrine. Hayek spent the final part of his career at the University of Freiburg, an intellectual center of ordeo-liberalism, associated with writers such as Wilhelm Röpke and Walther Eucken. Contrary to popular wisdom, the postwar Federal Republic was much more "market" economy than "social," and the Social Democratic components that created the awe-inspiring Modell Deutschland of the 1970s were added much later and as a result of considerable union pressure. One of the centers of neoliberal thought and policy advocacy has long been the Institute for World Economics at the University of Kiel. And then there is, at the other end of the republic, Hans-Werner Sinn's Ifo Research Institute in Munich. Sinn's advocacy of neoliberal reforms of the German political economy has been nothing short of monumental. He is a prolific publicist and makes frequent appearances on television talk shows. Can Germany still be saved? is the unfortunate translation of his also fairly alarmist Ist Deutschland noch zu retten? (2005), proffered as part of a flurry of popular treatises in the early 2000s that were singularly pessimistic about the future of organized Rhineland-style capitalism.

This book is thus clearly aimed at a mass audience and not the scholarly community. It has to be seen as part and parcel of the vociferous public relations debate which organized business and neoliberal pro-business think tanks such as Ifo or the employer-financed Institut der deutschen Wirtschaft and politicians sympathetic to the cause have engaged in since former president Roman Herzog's infamous "Ruck" speech in 1996. Neoliberal advocacy is big business in Germany. The metal sector employer association Gesamtmetall is underwriting a massive public relations campaign for neoliberal change, coordinated by the Cologne-based Institut Neue Soziale Marktwirtschaft (INSM), which draws on an annual budget of nine million euros.[3] Sinn has made appearances at several INSM-sponsored events. The institute sponsors public events, commissions journalistic reports, places advertisements in newspapers, and coordinates the journalistic activities of its prominent members. The foundation of media conglomerate Bertelsmann is equally active in funding neoliberally tinted "research," such as an annual country ranking in terms of "competitiveness." It has been consulted by both the Gerhard Schröder and Angela Merkel governments and left its fingerprints on the notorious Hartz agenda, the most serious legislative assault on the foundations of the German welfare state.

****

The author's analysis is not compelling; his "solutions" are wrong-headed or even disastrous. The ideological debt to Thatcherism--and, more disturbingly, evidence of lessons clearly not learned from fascism--is clear. He makes no reflection on the obvious fallacies of neoliberalism. Clearly, as last fall's crisis has demonstrated so dramatically, the economy is too important to leave it to economists. Sinn still wants to party like it's 1979. Let us hope no one else cares to join him.

FDR and the Hundred Days- New York Review of Books Essay

Seems that we had a bunch of books recently about FDR and the start of the New Deal. Russell Baker at The New York Review of Books has an essay that needs reading. Interesting how the Republicans do like their strongmen:

H.L. Mencken, after pronouncing Roosevelt "one of the most charming of men," wrote that, like most such men, he left the impression of being "somewhat shallow and futile." Other important journalists—Herbert Bayard Swope, Frank Kent, Arthur Krock—seemed to agree. Even more remarkably, after his election some of these very critics were saying he should be given dictatorial powers. Such was the sense of panic about the Great Depression as he took office.

"The nation expected Roosevelt to claim the powers of a dictator, or close to it," Adam Cohen states in Nothing to Fear. He quotes Senator William Borah, the highly respected progressive Republican from Idaho, declaring himself ready to put politics aside and "give our incoming President dictatorial power within the Constitution for a certain period."

"If this country ever needed a Mussolini, it needs one now," said Senator David Reed, a Pennsylvania Republican. Even Lippmann, having dismissed candidate Roosevelt just a few months earlier, wrote that the use of "'dictatorial powers,' if that is the name for it—is essential.'"

Roosevelt addressed the dictatorship question in his Inaugural Address, saying he intended to work with Congress on the nation's problems and hoped the president's traditional powers would suffice to help solve them. If not, he would ask for a "temporary departure," asking for "broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe."

As Cohen observes, this was "the most radical" passage in the Inaugural, "with its understated suggestion of autocracy." He notes that "it received an enthusiastic response from the crowd." Adolf Hitler had become chancellor of Germany just over one month earlier; Benito Mussolini, as Italy's prime ministerial dictator since 1922, was fairly popular in the United States. In the astonishing tumult of legislation that immediately followed Roosevelt's inauguration, Congress proved so eager to vote immediately for anything he wanted that he seemed to have been granted dictatorial power without asking for it.

But FDR chose not to be a dictator. No unitary executive theorist, he worked with Congress. Which probably did extend the Great Depression. But what would his critics prefer: the United States we have or an United States that endured a Mussolini/Francisco Franco?

Raymond Moley, who was very close to Roosevelt in the early days, told him his view should be that "there is no room in this country for two reactionary parties," that Democrats should be "a party of liberal thought, of planned action" on behalf of labor, farmers, and small businessmen. And that was what FDR made it when everything looked as hopeless as it could be and there had never been a worse hard time.

Certainly he did not make it by design. Some may say that he blundered his way into it and, what's more, all that spending did not end the Great Depression either; it took Hitler and World War II to do that. Of course World War II was, among other things, the biggest public works program in American history, which invites the inference that FDR was on the right track before the war, but simply failed to spend enough

Israel - Jewish State or Democracy

As much as we tout Israel as a democracy, this book review of 'The Hebrew Republic,' by Bernard Avishai by raised some questions:

"Can Israel be both a Jewish state and a democracy? At first glance the answer is yes. Governments are chosen by universal franchise, including perhaps one and a quarter million Israeli Arabs, who have their own non- or anti-Zionist political parties. Israel has an independent judiciary, an aggressive free press and a robust civil society. But non-Jews do not enjoy equal civil rights, mainly because of the Zionist, Haredi and settler states-within-a-state. As Avishai writes, “the institutions designed to advance the heroic Zionist state have become unworkable for the democratic one.”

It is almost impossible for non-Jews to buy land owned by the state or the Jewish National Fund. There is no secular marriage in Israel. Orthodox rabbis control the process of conversion, deciding who is a Jew and thus, often, who is a citizen. Mixed couples cannot be buried together in a state-funded Jewish cemetery. Even more absurd, Israel is probably the only country in the world that does not recognize its own nationality. Israelis cannot be inscribed as Israelis in the state population register, but must be recorded according to their religious or ethnic origin. Every request by Israelis — Jewish and Arab — to be listed simply as Israeli has so far been rejected. The government argues t"

The Atlantic Online | Flashbacks | America's Bard

Kind of a follow up to my post on Democratic Vistas, is Flashbacks | America's Bard from The Atlantic Online:

"Whitman, a free spirit whose writing enthusiastically celebrated the spirit of individualism and democracy, was essentially an 'optimist,' Calder wrote, with 'an intense and abiding faith in the triumph of right and justice.' He was a poet with 'absolute confidence that the men and women of 'these States,' and of all the world, would finally solve the problem of the unification of all races and peoples.'"

Maybe we will finally justify old Walt's optimism.

Books Worth Reading: Cat's Cradle

I get little time for reading fiction and I assume that is pretty much true of everyone else. Cat's Cradle is short moving like a hopped up Ford at full tilt. It has a special significance as being the first book I read of Kurt Vonnegut's. I decided to write this up when I read Cartoon apocalypse in The Guardian. I cannot disagree with The Guardian's comments of the book such as this:

No self-respecting realist would ever contrive to unite on the terrace of the presidential palace of San Lorenzo such a collection of representatively deformed people as Vonnegut gathers there: the three warped children of the inventor of ice-nine; the expiring dictator of San Lorenzo, "Papa" Monzano; a bluff American capitalist from Indiana and his hideously chipper wife; two decent and ineffectual American diplomats ("I was fired for pessimism. Communism has nothing to do with it"); the teenage sex goddess Mona Monzano; the hardboiled humanitarian Julian Castle and his son; a former Auschwitz physician doing unlikely penance at the Castle's clinic in the jungle ("If he keeps going at his present rate, working day and night, the number of people he's saved will equal the number of people he let die - in the year 3010"); and of course the boozy, glum, and nicotine-stained narrator himself, a journalist doing research for a book on Hiroshima called "The Day the World Ended".

But it is a dangerous book. Once read it can lead to people not taking our leader's pomposity quite so seriously. It will also lead to reading more Vonnegut and the more Vonnegut read, the better for all of us to learn to laugh at the end of the world

Books Worth Reading: Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas

Does this sound familiar?

I say we had best look our times and lands searchingly in the face, like a physician diagnosing some deep disease. Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us. The underlying principles of the States are not honestly believ'd in, (for all this hectic glow, and these melodramatic screamings,) nor is humanity itself believ'd in. What penetrating eye does not everywhere see through the mask? The spectacle is appaling. We live in an atmosphere of hypocrisy throughout. The men believe not in the women, nor the women in the men. A scornful superciliousness rules in literature. The aim of all the littérateurs is to find something to make fun of. A lot of churches, sects, &c., the most dismal phantasms I know, usurp the name of religion. Conversation is a mass of badinage. From deceit in the spirit, the mother of all false deeds, the offspring is already incalculable. An acute and candid person, in the revenue department in Washington, who is led by the course of his employment to regularly visit the cities, north, south and west, to investigate frauds, has talk'd much with me about his discoveries. The depravity of the business classes of our country is not less than has been supposed, but infinitely greater. The official services of America, national, state, and municipal, in all their branches and departments, except the judiciary, are saturated in corruption, bribery, falsehood, mal-administration; and the judiciary is tainted. The great cities reek with respectable as much as non-respectable robbery and scoundrelism....

To me, the description is not unfamiliar even if the phrasing is a bit askew. Walt Whitman wrote his Democratic Vistas after the Civil War. I read it after college, I was twenty-two (if my dilapidated memory serves me correctly) and it has been in the back of mind ever since.

I suppose someone can argue that Whitman's vision for American democracy can find itself reflected in the neo-con view of American power adopted by George W. Bush. I will say any such connection between Whitman and the neo-cons is the same between wine and vinegar.

Take the time to hunt it down and read it. I doubt there was ever another so enthusiastic about America's potential who refused to allow us to become the neighborhood bully.

You can find a copy online here and at Democratic Vistas: And Other Papers.

A Book Worth Reading: Francis Bacon' Novum Organum

Novum Organum (1620):

"The human understanding is of its own nature prone to suppose the existence of more order and regularity in the world than it finds. And though there be many things in nature which are singular and unmatched, yet it devises for them parallels and conjugates and relatives which do not exist. Hence the fiction that all celestial bodies move in perfect circles, spirals and dragons being (except in name) utterly rejected. Hence too the element of fire with its orb is brought in, to make up the square with the other three which the sense perceives. Hence also the ratio of density of the so-called elements is arbitrarily fixed at ten to one. And so on of other dreams. And these fancies affect not dogmas only, but simple notions also."

Book Review - Freedom of Religion

Something a little different but I think this New York Times' review is a good introduction to the law on the First Amendment's religion clauses: Liberty of Conscience.

"Constitution’s free exercise and establishment clauses, her premise is that “equality is the glue that holds the two clauses together.”A longtime enemy of elitism in a variety of guises, she fiercely resists the power of a majority religion, aided and abetted by the state, to create an in-group while subordinating out-groups. Nussbaum anchors the countervailing equality tradition in the writings of Roger Williams and James Madison. Williams, who had extensive friendly dealings with the Narragansett Indians, wrote into the charter for the Rhode Island colony a right to freedom of conscience that shocked the British. He coined the phrase “soule rape” for the limiting of religious expression that does not violate civil law or harm others."

Another Book on How Bush Screwed Up Iraq

The New York Times reviewed Fred Kaplan'sDaydream Believers:

"What sets Mr. Kaplan’s “Daydream Believers” apart is his emphasis on the Bush administration’s failure to come to terms with a post-cold-war paradigm, which, he argues, left America’s power diminished, rather than enhanced, as former allies, liberated from the specter of the Soviet Union, felt increasingly free to depart from Washington’s directives."

Also illuminating is his close analysis of the impact that the White House’s idées fixes had, not just on the Iraq war but also on other foreign policy problems like North Korea, and his detailed examination of the formative role that the former Soviet dissident Natan Sharansky played in shaping President Bush’s determination to try to export democracy around the world.

***

Like so many earlier books about the Bush administration and its conduct of the war in Iraq, “Daydream Believers” leaves the reader with a portrait of a White House that circumvented traditional policy-making channels to implement its big ideas, and that often chose willfully to ignore history and the advice of experts — from the Army chief of staff Gen. Eric K. Shinseki’s preinvasion recommendation that several hundred thousand troops would be needed to secure Iraq successfully, to warnings from the State Department that elections in the Middle East “could well be subject to exploitation by anti-American elements,” as they in fact were by Hamas in the Palestinian territories and Hezbollah in Lebanon.

Mr. Bush similarly emerges from this book as a naïve, impulsive and stubborn leader, whose moral certitude and penchant for denial have made him more inclined to double down on a bad bet than ever to admit a mistake, a president whose post-9/11 search for a bold new approach to the world made him susceptible to neoconservative ideas of pre-emption and unilateralism that had gained little traction with his father or Bill Clinton.

President Bush’s strategies, Mr. Kaplan writes near the end of this incisive book, failed “because they did not fit the realities of his era”: “They were based not on a grasp of technology, history or foreign cultures but rather on fantasy, faith and willful indifference toward those affected by their consequences.”

Failing to acknowledge the limits of American power, he writes, President Bush and his aides ended up trumpeting the country’s “reduced powers — and, as a result, they weakened their nation further.” They “set forth a new way of fighting battles — but withheld the tools for winning wars. They aimed to topple rogue regimes — with scant knowledge of the local culture and no plan for what to do after the tyrant fell. They dreamed of spreading democracy around the world — but did nothing to help build the democratic institutions without which mere elections were moot or worse. In their best-intentioned moments, they put forth ideas without strategies, policies without process, wishes without means.”

Why to Watch C-Span2

Yesterday, while thawing out the washing machine (do not ask, just realize we had subzero temps yesterday), I channel surfed to C-Span2. Book TV during the weekends with subjects ranging from the very interesting to duller than dull. I expected dull from the title of Bad Samaritans and the subject of economics. Even with the subject being economics, the author being Korean with a dry (but damned pointed) sense of humor and a Cambridge professor, I say it was worth the time. The world may not be as flat as Thomas Friedman wrote.

Why? The author, Ha-Joon Chang, spoke about how those countries favoring free trade for developing countries never used free trade when they started their capitalist systems. The facts I knew supported what the author spoke about. I think I will need to find a copy of this book.

You can find a better review at "Bad Samaritans". Amazon has the book and reviews here.

It's A Bad Day When You Don't Learn Something New ABout Fascism

I thought that when reading the Dunday Herald's review of Mussolini and the rise of fascism, by Donald Sassoon. I think of myself as not being one who sees a Fascist or a Nazi (they are two related but different types of creeps) behind every stupid politician (such as Bush or Cheney) but it helps to remember that Mussolini held elective office.

LIKE MANY of us, I suspect, I've always had the notion that Benito Mussolini came to power in Italy at the end of 1922 by marching into Rome at the head of a huge column of armed "blackshirts" before whom the democratic government crumbled. But, according to Donald Sassoon, it wasn't like that. Most of the fascists arrived in Rome by special trains. The ones who did march were a rain-soaked raggle-taggle bunch with hardly a modern weapon among them, and who could have been easily stopped by the army. In fact, some of them might have starved to death on the road if they hadn't been fed by friendly soldiers and police.

And far from sharing the hardships of his followers, Benito Mussolini, who was already an MP, arrived in Rome by overnight train from Milan and was whisked by limousine to the palace where King Victor Emmanuel III swore him in as head of a coalition - not a fascist - government. Mussolini then declared himself the king's "loyal servant". All of which made me realise I knew little about the rise of fascism in Italy - the subject of Donald Sassoon's latest book.

Reading further into the review, I got to thinking this sure puts the idea of "we have nothing to fear but fear itself" into perspective. The review also puts Frank Capra's Meet John Doe into perspective.

Free Speech - It's Past and its Future?

Reading The New Times's review of FREEDOM FOR THE THOUGHT THAT WE HATE A Biography of the First Amendment. By Anthony Lewis, reminded me how perilous has been our right to free speech. The courts only began protecting the First Amendment in the 1940's and then only in fits and starts. The review serves as a good reminder of this history.

The review reminds me that the future is not so bright we need sunglasses:

Lewis’s faith in judges also presumes that free speech controversies will take the same form in the future as they have in the past — namely, as legal battles between an overreaching government and the institutional press, with the judiciary as a neutral arbiter. But is this really likely? The rise of new technologies suggests that the free speech battles of the future may instead pit telecom corporations against private speakers, leaving judges on the sidelines. Consider Verizon’s recent decision to block abortion rights text messages by Naral Pro-Choice America from its mobile networks. (Under pressure, Verizon rescinded the decision but stood by its position that it can decide which messages to transmit.) As several scholars have argued, the solution to this problem of corporate censorship — open-access rules of “net neutrality” that would require telecom operators to make their services available to all speakers on equal terms — is in the hands of Congress and the Federal Communications Commission rather than the courts. No matter how heroic our judges, they’re not well positioned to make regulatory policy.

That paragraph brought to mind William Gibson's cyperpunk novels where corporations rule the world and governments appear non-existent. Or what a friend of mine calls a future of corporate serfdom. Remember, constitutional rights such as free speech only apply to the government.

New York Times Reviews The Squandering of America

This book review takes to task Bill Clinton, Hilary Clinton and Obama. The Squandering of America looks back to President Clinton's economic policies and at the current Democratic front-runners' economic policies.

About trade deals, something we learned in Indiana:

"The story repeats itself over and over. The Clintonites spent the ’90s negotiating one trade deal after another. But once the dust had settled, the laissez-faire approach appeared to have accelerated the decline of American industry. What the Clintonites (and, to be fair, this commentator) missed was that clearing aside trade barriers can leave you dangerously exposed when many of your trading partners — especially in East Asia — don’t reciprocate."

A difference exists between free trade and fair trade. I would say that unfair trade is not necessarily free trade. So what if we can trade without explicit tariffs? Are not lower wages, minimal environmental regulation, currency manipulations create tariffs in a different form?

I thought budget balancing was a great idea. Politically, if not economically, that is. Seems that Kuttner disagrees a bit with the economics:

Consider the budget. In 1993, Robert Rubin, then the president’s top economic adviser, helped persuade Clinton to pursue a huge deficit-reduction package. The theory was that the bond markets would reward him with lower interest rates. It seemed to work: the package passed, interest rates fell, and the economy boomed. But two hitches would become apparent. First, the productivity gains that underlay the boom had taken root years earlier. Second, interest rates didn’t actually fall much once you factored in a drop in inflation.

Kuttner doesn’t dispute the need for deficit reduction, given all the red ink Clinton inherited from his Republican predecessors. He just takes issue with what became a fetish for balanced budgets. It led Clinton to underinvest in areas like infrastructure and research and development, which some economists, including the Nobel laureate and former Clinton adviser Joseph Stiglitz, believe slowed growth. Meanwhile, the alarming rise in income inequality since 2000, coupled with European countries’ record of rapid, evenly distributed growth, suggests that a more activist government might be preferable on both social and economic grounds.

If Clinton underinvested in infrastructure and research, then what can we suppose about George W.'s investments in the same and our future growth?

And what about Obama and Mrs. Clinton?

Still, given the influence of wealthy investors on the Clinton and Obama campaigns in particular, Kuttner is right to be worried. In May, the legendary hedge fund manager Paul Tudor Jones II held a 300-person fund-raiser for Barack Obama at his Greenwich, Conn., mansion. If a future Obama administration were to consider, say, reining in derivatives, could the president resist pressure from the likes of Jones? It’s possible. But, like Kuttner, I’m skeptical.

The book turns up on the New York Times business page, also. Under the headline A Grim Diagnosis for the U.S., and a Prescription comes some slightly different points.

“The potential of our economy to underwrite a society of broad prosperity is being sacrificed to financial speculation,” Mr. Kuttner declares in his new book’s opening chapter. “The winnings are going to a narrow elite, jeopardizing not only our broad prosperity but our solvency. In less than a decade, our government budget, gutted by tax cuts, has shifted from endless projected federal surpluses to infinite deficits. Our trade imbalances and financial debt to the rest of the world have grown from a modest concern to levels that could produce a crash.”
***
Mr. Kuttner attributes the squandering of America’s economic health mainly to what he describes as the systematic dismantling of the government-managed economy that was created under Franklin D. Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman.

The push for deregulation in recent decades, he contends, has created a “casino economy” in which labor unions have become marginalized, pension funds are hijacked as vehicles for speculation, and financial elites enrich themselves through hedge funds and private equity groups with little accountability to government or the public.

Am I the only who reads the phrase "casino economy" and thinks about the subprime mortgage mess?

Head And Heart: American Christianities - Garry Wills - Book Review - New York Times

I think this New York Times Book Review of Garry Wills' new book, Head And Heart: American Christianities , worthing noting.

"The “head” of Wills’s title is Enlightenment religion, embodied in the thoughtful but sometimes chilly deism of Washington, Jefferson and Madison. The “heart,” by contrast, is evangelicalism, to be found in America’s emotionally intense but intellectually thin revivalists, like George Whitefield before the Revolution and Charles Grandison Finney not long after. These are the great polarities of America’s religious history, and their creative conflict has contributed to America’s religious diversity and vitality, and to church-state separation. “Head” has generally been the religion of the elite and “heart” its populist counterpart under the leadership of revivalist stars like Francis Asbury, Dwight Moody, Billy Sunday and Billy Graham."

***

How did we get from the Puritan ideal of zealous intolerance to a contemporary America in which no church is established and most Christians, Jews, Muslims, Hindus and others try to coexist? By means of the Enlightenment. Wills praises the Anglo-American philosophers and statesmen of the late 17th and 18th centuries, beginning with John Locke, who advocated toleration, disestablishment and humanitarian reform, and whose influence reached its height in the era of the American Revolution.

***

Too much head or heart, unbalanced by the other, causes trouble. Wills rebukes today’s evangelicals for their intellectual feebleness. He shows that their effort to make born-again Christians out of the founding fathers is simply bad history. He dismisses their claim that creationism is a science, and he reproaches them for demonizing the social transformations of recent decades as a “secular humanist” conspiracy. A Christianity that refuses to face up to intellectual difficulties, he believes, will always render itself ridiculous.

On the other hand, brainpower alone is inadequate. He argues that by the 1830s the Unitarians, honorable heirs of the Enlightenment, were more than a little short on heart; even their response to miracles was ponderously cerebral. Transcendentalism was the reaction, made distinctive by its borrowings from European Romanticism. Emerson and Thoreau rejected what they saw as the arid confines of Scripture to become nature mystics. They repudiated tradition, yet even they could not shake off “the Puritan focus on self-scrutiny, a kind of rapt contemplation of their own souls.”

***

Historians and sociologists for nearly a century have wondered about America’s resistance to secularization. Why, they ask, has religion thrived so much more in America than in the rest of the industrialized democracies (where, by now, only tiny minorities still go to church)? Because, says Wills, religion is not entangled with the state. Both benefit from separation, and neither is distorted by the other. Conversely, he believes that both have suffered from periodic attempts to reduce the separation, like Prohibition in the early 20th century or George W. Bush’s faith-based initiatives in the early 21st.

A few years ago I got in a heated argument with one of my conservative Republican friends about this very subject. He could not understand why I was against religion mixing with government. For all his usual concern about government involvement into anything, he saw nothing wrong with government mixing with religion. Government always corrodes and corrupts religion. Read this review, if not book. Besides, I generally enjoy reading Wills.

Bush, Presidential Power and some new books

The New York Times Reviews two books on Bush and Presidential power.

....The salient question of the moment, then, is about Bush’s legal legacy. After his tenure, what will come of the changes his lawyers have wrought, especially their attempts to expand executive power?

Two new books offer contrasting answers. Charlie Savage, the author of “Takeover,” depicts a presidency on steroids, pumped up by Vice President Dick Cheney. For decades, Savage argues, Cheney has “wanted to permanently alter the constitutional balance of American government, establishing powers that future presidents would be able to wield as well.” And because presidential power once accrued generally sticks, Cheney is likely to get his wish. In “The Genius of America,” Eric Lane and Michael Oreskes also rue the increase of presidential power at Congress’s expense. But they think our system of government can recover, if only we can remember and keep faith with the crucial accomplishments of the Constitution’s framers. Viewed through this lens, Bush’s lawyers seem smaller and their influence less enduring.

***

Today, however, we’re too weary of our own strife to remember all of this. “The message we are hearing is that our government does not work,” Lane and Oreskes write. “The message we should be hearing is that our government is a reflection of our own divisions.” If Congress is supine, that’s because we’ve helped to beat it down. If we recalled the lessons of the nation’s founding, on the other hand, we’d quit looking for shortcuts and falling for imperially-minded presidents. We’d see the Bush-Cheney march of executive power for the threat that it is. And we’d put a halt to it. A rallying cry, perhaps, for the post-2008 era.

Maybe we should wonder if our educational system failed us. Why are so many people willing to give up so much because the President says we must? The President - and here I write of the office and not the present ninny in the Oval Office - has two major jobs: execute the laws passed by Congress and act as Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. He is not Der Fuhrer and we have no fuhrerprinzip. So now do Americans act like we should?

Brave New World revisited

Once upon a time, when I was much younger and far more feistier, I argued with a high school English teacher that 1984 was superior to A Brave New World. I am now older and less feisty but I still have this opinion. In my more humorous moments, I put my elevating 1984 down to my hatred of rats. The English teacher thought (in 1978) that 1984 was a failed prophesy, the closer we came to that year the less influence it would have. Here we are twenty-three, almost twenty-four years after that drear year and Orwell booms louder than Huxley. Huxley's presents a creepy world while Orwell's world is one of horrors that we can see in the daily news.

With all that said, Guardian Unlimited Books has an essay on A Brave New World. Yes, it is worth reading. I would say that I came away with a better appreciastion of Huxley's book. So go read Everybody is happy now' :

"It was Huxley's genius to present us to ourselves in all our ambiguity. Alone among the animals, we suffer from the future perfect tense. Rover the Dog cannot imagine a future world of dogs in which all fleas will have been eliminated and doghood will finally have achieved its full glorious potential. But thanks to our uniquely structured languages, human beings can imagine such enhanced states for themselves, though they can also question their own grandiose constructions. It's these double-sided imaginative abilities that produce masterpieces of speculation such as Brave New World"

For George W.: why?

I am reading Bush Profiled: Big Ideas, Tiny Details this morning and throughout the book review, I keep wanting to know one thing. That thing is why Bush has done the things he has done. I have yet to read or hear anything describing a coherent worldview. Obviously, he wanted to change the world - a true conservative there! - but that is not how he put himself forward in 2000. Where did he want to lead us: to the Promised Land or to Donner Pass? Yes, I know that expecting coherent thought from our President asks a lot of him and he has not delivered anything close to coherent in eight years. It does make a difference, though. Understanding his goals makes a difference in finding to be a crypto-fascist, a cynical politician looking to get elected, an incompetent fool, or a boob. This is from the book review:

Although the President Bush described in this volume will be familiar to most readers, Mr. Draper colors in the outlines with lots of tiny details. Apparently Mr. Bush loves doing imitations of Dr. Evil from the “Austin Powers” movies. He keeps meticulous count of all the books he’s read. (At one point he tells Mr. Draper he’s up to 87 for the year.) And he’s wildly competitive about his bike riding, eager to show his younger Secret Service companions “who’s The Man” and insistent on burning at least 1,000 calories during each workout.

What books does he read? What has he learned from them? It sounds as if he reads just to see how many he can muddle through. He certainly seems intent on competition for the sake of competition rather than for what may be won.

Bush and Cheney Books Reviewed

Not here but at Legal History Blog. Check out Reviewed: New Books on Bush and Cheney.

While on the subject of Bush and Cheney and their power grab for the Executive Branch, take a look at Conscience of a Conservative which is slated for September 9 in the New York times Magazine. This is an excerpt:

The Bush administration’s legalistic “go-it-alone approach,” Goldsmith suggests, is the antithesis of Lincoln and Roosevelt’s willingness to collaborate with Congress. Bush, he argues, ignored the truism that presidential power is the power to persuade. “The Bush administration has operated on an entirely different concept of power that relies on minimal deliberation, unilateral action and legalistic defense,” Goldsmith concludes in his book. “This approach largely eschews politics: the need to explain, to justify, to convince, to get people on board, to compromise.”

Opposing persuasion is force and/or subterfuge. What kind of government imposes its policies through lies or force?

Book review: the CIA

The New York Times reviewed the new CIA book. I am old enough to remember the Church Commission (poisonous cigars, anyone?). Even Ian Fleming put the CIA down as mediocre (read the beginning of From Russia From Love - which I was doing about the time of the Church Commission).

But the reviewer does ask a good question: how to have an effective intelligence agency in a democratic government? I suggest asking the British, the French or the Israelis.

Delay coming back?

The New York Times reviewed Tom Delay's new book. Cheney has probably made us forget the vileness of Tom Delay. The following passage ought to bring back to mind the whiny, self-victimization ideology of the Republicans.

DeLay’s capacity to excuse himself in every particular, and turn the blame onto his adversaries, is remarkable. In fact, he was chastised by the ethics panel in 1996 for raising money on the Capitol grounds and rebuked by the ethics committee in 1999 for threatening a trade association with mayhem if they persisted in their plan to hire a former Democratic congressman as their president (they did, and two treaties were held up for months in retaliation). In both ethics cases, the actions were bipartisan, as was the subsequent series of three rebukes on separate matters issued by the ethics panel in 2004. As for the lawsuit, it was initiated as a result of DeLay’s dealings in his pest control business, Albo, which had been troubled for years with tax problems, and it was brought by his former partner, a lifelong Republican.

I will admit here a personal experience with Tom Delay's fundraising tactics which does color my attitude towards Delay. In 2003-04, I kept getting voicemails about some group seeking to give me some sort of honor. When a live person finally caught up with me, I learned that they were working for one of Delays' PAC's. I explained in no uncertain terms that I had never voted in a Republican primary, would never vote in a Republican primary and certainly had no use for his boss or his boss's ideas. I still think any Republican dumb enough to try and solicit funds from me is too dumb to be running the country.