Earth Democracy

Justice, Sustainability, And Peace. Vandana Shiva believes that peasants should be able to make a living based on access to land, rivers, forests and oceans and that governments must protect the health of these commons for the good of all. This makes her a radical. She also makes complete sense and answers many of my questions about the inequity of the poor.

Much of this book is a discussion of the commons and the enclosure laws in England in the 16th century that allowed the commons to be privatized. Critics of Vandana Shiva claim that she is asking for a return to feudalism, but they are not hearing her out. (And besides feudalism guaranteed that the peasants would eat, while privatization guarantees that those without money will starve while taking away access to the land that originally provided them with a livelihood.) Much of the battle of the enclosure laws is waged with words. By claiming that an area of land is a wasteland and is not being used by anyone, this somehow gives private companies the right to buy the land or contract to use it for development purposes.

She ferrets out the flaws in the arguments of the opposition ie Richard Epstein in his book "Takings—Private Property and the Power of Eminent Domain". Their position is that government cannot protect natural resources like beaches, streams and other property because it would be a "taking" and therefore the owners must be compensated. This argument, she says, ignores the original taking of these public lands during colonialism, but it also confuses public trust with eminent domain which is virtually the opposite. And finally the public is redefined as a collection of individuals thus the loss of property is calculated based on its higher value to one individual vs each member of the public. Here she has not only explained how things have changed, but what kinds of arguments have influenced far reaching policies and how we have been manipulated into buying into the ideology of privatization over public interests. This is an important concept because it is a cultural battle of words that over time has eliminated the very notion of a public trust. If it were not still going on, this book would just be a historical treatise, but with water rights and clean air and the earth's atmosphere at stake, her arguments serve as the ground floor of resistance.

She also debunks the argument that having a commons doesn't work because everyone will abuse it. Not so, she says, as long as everyone can subsist off the land and be self-reliant, the community will work together to insure that no one party takes advantage. Assumptions are being made by free market advocates that have messed with our minds, but her examples show a different picture.

She points out the correlation between economic livelihood and the attraction of fundamentalism both here and abroad. When people no longer have a livelihood to identify with and globalization forces upon them a cultural sameness, they are attracted to religion and will vote for issues relating to cultural identity rather than economic identity. This explains why Gay Marriage has the ridiculous political status as a hot button issue when there is so much else at stake.

She claims that when enclosure laws allow people a living only by selling their labor (and their bodies I would add) then that encourages a population increase as families feel they need to have more children to bring in more income or to insure that at least one survives to care for them in old age since more die.

Her discussion includes the enclosure of intellectual and biological property with Monsanto trying to patent seed species. While governments pass laws that forbid farmers from participating in trade as they have always done, ie: saving their own seeds to sell to other farmers. She explains how governments help out large companies by passing laws inappropriate to small producers, for whom complying to these laws, would put them out of business, ie food packaging laws under the guise of safety. Thus her alliance with Slow Food Nation (she is Vice President) to support local foods and small producers.

She talks about how the sustenance economy is not valued on the market because it does not involve paid labor ie;, women's work, home economics, child rearing. Yet such work is how the recognized market can exist. She warns that the market is bent on the exploitation of resources that support the sustenance economy such as clean water, air and land and comments that the only sustainable economy is the sustenance economy because of its built-in feed back loops and community. The market however tends to solve problems by providing solutions of increasing complexity involving more exploitation of resources and more privatization as seen with privatization of water.

Getting inside Vandana Shiva's worldview stretches my head, but I really think she gets to the root of global issues and successfully relates how economic justice is the road to democracy and in turn to peace. She is apparently a huge threat to advocates of individualistic wealth building systems, thus the caustic negative reviews of her work as extremely leftist. The rich don't like being told that their success comes at great cost to the poor rather than out of their own smarts. But If we could embrace what she is saying, solving our most destructive planetary problems may look a lot simpler.

The Long Descent by John Michael Greer

Another present from the Energy Bulletin for pre-publication review. I've been reading John Michael Greer's Archdruid Report for a few months now and I thought his book would be pretty esoteric, but it's actually brilliant in its simplicity and a much-needed wise and reasonable voice for the peak oil community. He covers all the usual information about what peak oil is and how it will impact society and create a descent into a pre-industrial state of affairs, but here he departs from the brethren to discuss why the peak oil community is failing to lead society towards helpful approaches to dealing with this predicament (emphasis on predicament as opposed to problem to be solved implying with technology.)

This collective failure of the imagination he attributes to Western society having provided only two stories—The Myth of Progress and The Myth of the Apocalypse. And these stories run deep. The Myth of Progress came out of the Enlightenment and sold everyone on the idea that if we simply acted rationally in our own interest the world would progress linearly to a golden age of everything. The other is the Myth of the Apocalypse, which says that we did live a golden age of harmony with each other and the planet, but we took a wrong turn and it's been one blind alley of misguided depravity after another. Classic Greek tragedy vs. comedy looks like.

The brilliance of Greer is that he takes the trouble to explain these social mindsets from the beginning so by the end of it you are like "yeah how obvious". What actually made the myth of progress work was abundant cheap energy making possible all these fabulous visions of opulence for all and now that it's not going to continue we are all like doomsday is coming, we bad. This was popular thinking in the '70s too, but then we cut back on oil consumption by 15% and the world did not end giving us a new opportunity to continue our myth of progress. Here he explains how short term political policies of the Reagan years and the manipulation of oil prices brought us to where we are now, when we could have done something about it when Carter was telling us to cut back.

He describes various coping strategies these dual myths have prompted, in response to peak oil, including the lone cabin in the woods survival-ism to the creation of lifeboat communities or earnestly campaigning for a political leader who will install policies that will save us, (but no one in their right mind would vote for because it interferes with our myth of progress). He then proceeds to describe very basic skills that we would do well to cultivate having to do with growing food, making things for ourselves, low energy transportation and reviving community governance and self reliance. He points out that it doesn't have to be all back to pioneer living and using hand tools, we can use advanced technology too if we set it up beforehand to cover basic tasks and not attempt to float this bloated high energy lifestyle that we think of as normal, because we just aren't going to have time or enough fuel to do that. That normal was an aberration of having stumbled on the energy dense, dead dinosaur deposits of oil. We had that opportunity to transit more slowly, but just because we missed it doesn't mean instant catastrophe. Due to adjustment factors he describes as part of his catabolic collapse theory, this deindustrialization will take several generations. So don't sweat it just get your mind around it and proceed in an orderly fashion to the nearest practical skill building class. Quite affirming, I would say, for all us appropriate technology flickerati. I sure hope this book becomes the peak oil spiritual bible, because if Kunstler continues to hold sway it's just going to make it more difficult.

Stuffed & Starved

Raj Patel is much sought after these days since the rise in the price of food worldwide. In his book he attempts to explain the world food system in the tradition of Frances Moore Lappe's Food First and Diet for a Small Planet. I already know quite a bit about the system so there wasn't too much that was new to me in his account. Some explanations stand out. The Hourglass Figure he describes, with accompanying charts, is a good visual image for how money is made in the food system at the point where it is processed by large scale mechanization owned by a few mega corporations like Nestles. These companies process flour for tortillas, beans for coffee, rice when its milled and soybean crushing, for example and cause bottlenecks that jack the price up because only a few players can process food on large scale to meet demand.

He also describes how, historically, the food system was developed to feed those working in the newly industrialized urban areas. The point was to keep this cheap labor from revolting by feeding them cheaply at the expense of the farmers. Our food system technologies came about because of the needs of war, he explains, in that food had to be preserved for transportation under adverse conditions, plus the surplus created by government subsidizing the war effort in food supplies was the beginning of surplus grain being used to manipulate world politics through AID. The whole sociopolitical impact of government policies, AID and trade all play a part in how destructive agribusiness is to life on earth basically. He shows to what lengths Monsanto and company are willing to go to get their way for GMO seeds.

On the other end of the spectrum he talks about how the supermarket was developed to exploit people's impulses to buy. And the inputs in our food that allow it to be transported without damage, but have a huge impact on how crops are used—lecithin for instance. In discussing the obesity epidemic he points out that this is rarely discussed as a symptom of the failures of our food system and poverty, but is blamed on the individual. Obesity patterns in US very similar that of South Africa.

He describes a couple of movements working to change the system including the Landless Rural Movement in Brazil which is a voluntary cooperative system that is democratically run and organized by the farmers trying to occupy land. The details he gives from having visited one of these settlements broadened my understanding of this movement which Noam Chomsky called the world's most important social movement.

He is a fan of the Slow Food movement and farmer's markets, but not organic food in that organic food production as applied to agribusiness is not much different from chemical agribusiness.

In his conclusion he lists 10 ways to change the system

1. Transform our tastes and get away from what commercial food production has taught us to want.
2. Eat locally and seasonally
3. Eat agroecologically meaning eat food produced in harmony with the local environment as developed in Cuba and embraced by Masanobu Fukuoka's One Straw Revolution in Japan as well as the UN developed sustainable agriculture network.
4. Support locally owned business not supermarkets or big box stores. He points out the flaw in corporate responsibility because it hinges on profit being made.
5. All workers have the right to dignity through unions that are allowed to organize without persecution.
6. Profound and comprehensive rural change such as equitable land distribution, but also including education, healthcare and infrastructure.
7. Living wages for all so poor can access food.
8. Support for sustainable architecture of food. Local markets and CSAs.
9. Snapping the food system's bottleneck. Curb power of monopoles through anti-trust laws.
10. Owning and providing restitution for the injustices of the past and present. Forgive debt owed by the Global South to the Global North and start paying back for damage we have done.

Exposed, The Toxic Chemistry of Everyday Products...

The main treatise of this book is not so much about what's poisoning us in our everyday lives, although that is mentioned, it is that the US no longer controls industry standards because the EU has taken the lead in banishing toxins from multiple industries including electronics, cosmetics, and children's toys as well as banning genetically engineered foods. It has also led the way in demanding that manufacturers take back products at the end of its lifecycle. All this is significant because the EU is also influencing China and India and other emerging economies. This sidestepping of the Bush administration's resistance to change has caused us to remain the guinea pigs for not only our own industry, but also serving as a dumping ground for products that cannot be sold in the EU and other regulated countries.

The book describes the historical precedence that has laid the way for this parting of the ways with the EU. The US chose to monitor dangerous products by allowing citizens to sue for damages when they are hurt by products. This litigious climate of consumer protection is a process that industry has, of course, worked to erode. Meanwhile in Europe, lawsuits were not much tolerated and settlements were small, but citizens had a political climate that demanded that the government protect them from dangerous products in the first place, thus was born the precautionary principle. The difference between the two is that, with the cautionary principle, the burden of proof is on the manufacturer to prove that their product is safe while our approach puts the burden of proof on the consumer to prove that a product is unsafe. In other words our brand of capitalism allowed business to flourish at the risk of consumers while their democracy put citizen safety first and let industry operate within those parameters. (In reality they fight over this just as much as we do, but the base from which they begin is different.)

I also took note that the generic brands are the most likely to fall to the bottom of the regulations heirarchy since the "white box" stores that sell these products always seek the path of least resistance, ie cheapest, easiest to make and least likely to object customer. This is politically interesting because activists are always going after the name brands, but nothing is ever done about the off off off Broadway brands.

The most interesting implication of this shift in power towards the EU is that it has reversed the "race to the bottom" that globalization forced upon us and has used it to leverage up the lax standards of US industry. If this writer had used more inflammatory language such as "race to the bottom" this book would have been much more exciting to read instead of the dry as dust slog it was. I might also add that the implications of this shift points to how free market capitalism is trumped by heavily regulated capitalism (formally socialized democracy). So there.

No Logo

I didn't read No Logo when it first came out because I was already a no logo kind of girl. It was worth reading though because she fleshed out the whole sweatshop situation for me. After spending the first few chapters describing how companies have gone from making products to advertising them to branding and now focus only on creating an image, she describes how the whole sweatshop issue is a result of companies getting rid of their own factories and searching for the cheapest labor to assemble their products.

Contractors compete with each other to get those everyday low prices for them. This created what were basically indoor work camps, all over Asia, enclosed in walled compounds that were protected from local taxes in an effort to lure the big name "investors". These "export processing zones" or "free trade zones" are impenetrable to outsiders and short on inspectors. The labor, usually teenage girls and young women, are kept intimidated to discourage labor unions from forming. So what we're talking about here is a structural component of globalization. Countries compete with each other for the big brand name investors so they grant the foreign investor immunity from their own laws regarding minimum wage and conditions, while inspectors turned a blind eye to violations of safety and overtime claiming those to be a management problem. Brand name companies don't have to face the conditions they have created until activists force them to.

Klein asked the same question posed by Travels Of A T-shirt in which the author claims that such factory work is preferable to working on the farm. This was also a statement made by one of the factory owners. The girls are outraged by this assumption and point out that it is just a justification given by those who employ them. One said she missed her family and wished she was at home with them because at least when she was sick there would be someone to take care of her. And they only make enough money to cover expenses so they have little opportunity to either help their family or improve their own lives. Klein gained access to the factories by sneaking into one of the compounds. The author of the t-shirt book was invited into a factory by the owner, so there are factories and there are factories. As I learned from the Green Festival, activists have now established fair trade guidelines and factories that comply to their guidelines can register as a fair trade factory.

Klein also gave me insight into what happened to activism when it got mired in identity politics. She herself was in college fighting for women's rights, gay rights, minority rights, etc. as was I. The problem was that the politics became all about equal representation in the media and equal opportunity for jobs. The equal representation part was co-opted by advertisers looking for niche markets while the equal opportunity for jobs became all about access for middle class women and minorities. Everyone forgot all about the poor and the class system that made sure the poor would remain poor. My complaint was that gay rights had become all about rights for gay people who could present as nearly identical to straight white married upper middle-class people. And women's rights had become all about getting women into the CEO's office while neglecting them at the welfare mom level.

She points out how activists narrowed down their focus, but that there's been a come back as students came to understand that the shirt on their backs was made by their peers in sweatshop conditions and began to protest globalization. Her book predates the WTO protest in Seattle, so she was on the pulse. In the end she acknowledges that there is a limit to activism focused on brand names, while the bigger damage is being done by companies that extract resources and aren't household names.

The Secret History of the American Empire

The fun of reading John Perkins is that his books are more like spy novels than heavy reading about globalization and empire building. So interspersed between exotic descriptions of Asian hotties entertaining corporate hit men, are nice summations of how the IMF, World Bank and economic hit men collude to bring countries into the corporate empire. Basically the same ground as covered in Shock Doctrine, but with more stories of illicit CIA activity.

Often his sources are cloak and dagger in their anonymity. This seems to render him suspect in the eyes of many skeptical readers, but the stories are still compelling and likely true. I mean why wouldn't they be? We now know from recently declassified reports that there was indeed a CIA backed coup to overthrow Allende and then he was assassinated. He describes how a democratically elected leader might be elected based on his promises to help the poor, distribute land and otherwise take resources away from corporations by nationalizing mines, oil reserves, etc,. This is when corporate economic hit men first try to bring around the elected leader with bribes, then when that doesn't work, the CIA jackals threaten him and if that doesn't take, the CIA stage a coup and finally an assassination if he can't be budged.

He also tells the story of a young couple who wanted to find out what life was really like as a sweatshop worker living on $2.41 a day in Indonesia. Conditions described were bordering on destitute so now I'm really mad at the economics professor who wrote Travels of a T-shirt and concluded that these jobs were giving women economic freedom. Besides with the Gap being exposed as an employer of child slave labour, I'm even more inclined to assume that bad conditions and human rights violations are more the rule than the scandalous exception.

There was also another interesting tidbit about OPEC and the gas shortage of the '70s. According to his sources, Nixon was playing a brilliant game of chess by backing Israel in the Six day war which he knew would piss off the Arabs who then raised oil prices. This is interesting in that I've not read anywhere else that pissing off the Arabs was intentional. It was after that that economic hitmen were sent into Saudi Arabia to make a deal for corporations to handle all their infrastructure. US also persuaded them to invest their oil money in American treasury bonds and agree to only sell oil for dollars. Since Nixon took the dollar off the gold standard this gave the dollar an "oil" standard which we are busy trying to protect by going to war in any oil producing country that makes deals to sell oil in Euros. Speculators seem to betting that the Euro will win, given the 40% devaluation of the dollar in recent years.

His stories about Africa tell how NGOs and the Peace Corp are inadvertantly helping corporate takeover, by instilling first world living standards. For the amount of money spent to send over Western "teachers", they could be developing teachers who are already there who know the land already and how to farm it. Instead the Peace Corps teachers are bringing in GMO seeds and pesticides and fertilizers to "help" farmers get into debt and kill off their land.

And finally he talks about how to make change, telling stories of how Rainforest Action Network got their point across through public humiliation of corporations like Home Depot. He emphasizes that even though companies seem so big, so was the English crown to the colonialists. Though it's not my preferred metaphor, he does persuade me to believe that ordinary people can put pressure on corporations.

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

Naomi Klein brings us up to speed on how the economic agenda of the neo-cons came to be the mantra of American foreign policy and is now coming home to roost. I wanted to pour myself a stiff drink from the opening chapter where she describes what was really happening in New Orleans post Katrina. Her account of how the ideas of one man—Milton Friedman— in what was known as the Chicago School of economics (from the University of Chicago) was exported to South America, then Africa, then the Eastern block and Russia, South East Asia and finally to Iraq, is enraging, heart breaking and illuminating. She answered so many of my questions that she has forever galvanized my understanding of the last 35 years, just as Howard Zinn opened my eyes to the 200 years prior to that.

Much of what I knew already about the policies of the World Bank and the structural adjustment programs of the IMF was just the beginning of her tale. So much more was going on from the Ford Foundation sponsoring students from South America to study with Milton Friedman to the banks freezing all loans in order to force Allende's government to buckle to corporate takeovers of state factories to the support of strongman dictatorships by the US to Amnesty International erasing all mention of why people were being disappeared and tortured (so as not to offend corporate donors). Yes, why indeed? Why did we simply accept that South American dictators enjoyed such activities just for kicks? Turns out that all those tortured and disappeared were leaders in the socialist party. Capitalism is not the preferred economic system of a democratic people. All over the world the neo-cons were having to fight democratically elected socialist governments and the tactics they used resemble war and now is war in Iraq.

The underlying thesis of Ms. Klein's book is that the preferred strategy for forcing a country to embrace capitalism is to shock them with such severe economic hardships that the populace is too stunned to realize what is going on and when they do come too, they find out that their infrastructure has been sold dirt cheap to mult-national companies and that contracts have been made for so far into the future that the new governments are unable to stop the resulting rise in unemployment, 25% say, or the putting out of business of local businesses. Wal-Mart anyone?

I have long been looking for a way to explain the flawed thinking of free market ideology and now that I know it was just an extremist economic theory involving the desire for an unobtainable pure system, I can compare it to another extremist ideology. That of breeding the perfect race. It just isn't possible and to do so would be to hack off all the parts that offend the ideal. We know where that got us in the racial cleansing department. It is my sincere hope that one day the phrase "free market" will be as abhorrent as the word eugenics.

Meanwhile, having been mauled by such free market extremism, the victim's best bet is to play dead until the Grizzly bear moves on. In South America where the victim was left for dead, a new socialism is being born as countries are now banding together to make their own trade agreements and to keep prices stable. (Fluctating prices is how money is made on the free market by speculators/investors). And as long as profits are to be more easily made elsewhere, the beast will move on. That's how South East Asia was tripped up. The Asian Tiger countries took the advice of free market advocates to allow capital to move freely and, on rumor alone, it did move, leaving these countries with no money in the till. Then when they said well that didn't work let's restrict capital again, the IMF swooped in and said oh no, no, no you can't do that if you want to be part of free trade, you'll scare off investors, you must take money out of public services. Ms. Klein makes a correlation between the 20% rise in girls sold into the sex trade in Thailand and the implementation of IMF structural adjustments.

Meanwhile with all this destruction going on, in the new world of post 9/11 war, terrorism and global warming, a whole new market has evolved in security and reconstruction. And we thought the defense industry was bad. Now the stock market can cheer on death and destruction because its good for more than half of all businesses.

The world was caught by surprise by such unfettered greed because, before we always had the example of the Soviet Union and communism to tame the beast. With the fall of Russia, capitalism could roar on. This could have been a very depressing story, but Ms. Klein ends her tale by describing how people learned from this experience and are fighting back by decentralizing power, localizing it in essence, and making laws that their people will now know to make stick. May it be so.

A Game As Old As Empire

Following on the success of Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, this anthology brings to the public eye even more crimes with more concrete details than John Perkins was able to impart. The whole shady loans to developing countries is explained plus a chapter just on the Phillipines to demonstrate what happens. And if the World Bank thinks a project is too much of a credit risk or is environmentally unsound even for their standards, there's the export credit agencies for the odd nuclear power plants and massive arms sales to areas of conflict.

Then there's the whole nefarious world of offshore banking which is reported here to be a substantial part of the global financial traffic thus allowing all the crooks of the world to channel profits out of their home countries, launder money, evade taxes and take kickbacks without anybody being the wiser. That's also how the arms trade and drug trafficking can carry on.

Repressive regimes in Africa mine resources from the land with what amounts to slave labor created from local wars. Coltan for instance is an ingredient of the Sony playstation 2. Here also, how oil production sharing agreements will rob the Iraqis of most of their revenue stream.

Debt relief just creates more burden for the same country, but here is offered some suggestions which would require the redistribution of social assets like land, education, technology and political power. Also resurrecting basic legal principles which would deem certain dubious debt contracted by dishonest governments to be non-enforceable. And addressing the offshore banking problem of capital flight.

The Travels of a T-Shirt In the Global Economy

This is just the kind of non-fiction I like–a journey in search of the truth filled with anecdotes about real people. The author, however, is an economist professor and one who upholds the ideals of the "free market" while acknowledging that one doesn't exist. Her quest is to find out whether the claims of recent student activists about the horrors of sweatshops are really justified.

The long view she offers through history taught me a lot about the influence of the textile industry as the primary driver of the industrial revolution—satanic mills and all that, not to mention driving the slave trade to work the cotton farms to supply those mills in England. Is this not an early example of globalization?

Then there's the history of protectionism which gave me a working knowledge of how politics work in the American congress and the role of the textile industry in the South re: trade and foreign policy. And the role these protectionist policies played in helping industrialize all the little players in all those third world countries that wouldn't have been able to compete with Japan or China, but were given their moment in the market because of US quota systems.

As a good economist would, the author sees this industrialization of all the corners of the world as a leg up out of poverty. She did give me pause in her claim that jobs for women in sweatshops working long hours for little money were an improvement over jobs at home on the farm working even longer hours for no pay under the authority of the family patriarch. We all know about the oppression of women in China, after all, so we'll go along with that.

The history of China's early textile manufacturing serves as an example of sustainable production. The farmers themselves, the entire family, carded the cotton, spun it into yarn and wove it into cloth on their home loom. They made their own clothes from it, then took the rest to market to sell. Her point is that this system created no bottlenecks so no Eli Whitney to invent the cotton gin or whatever was needed to ease those bottle necks, the solving of which would increase production (which would result in increased demand, but she doesn't mention that).

The most fun chapter is about the used clothing market. Unlike e-waste, dumping our used clothing on poor countries around the world isn't toxic. Though the documentary T-shirt Travels claims that such dumping destroys the local clothing industry, she makes the observation that it was already destroyed through mismanagement of the local governments and because socialism didn't work because factories didn't seem to produce and things just didn't get done.

Whenever pro free market writers talk about mismanagement by local governments, I've learned to read that as a sign of lazy thinking. Local governments may be mismanaged and corrupt, but they do not have nearly the power of destruction that large scale economic policies enacted by the World Bank and IMF do. Her anecdotes of the entrepreneurs she meets does convince me that socialism is miserable at providing incentives for workers to produce and innovate, but then she didn't see The Take about the power of democratically run cooperatives to produce for whatever markets they can find usually local.

It's too bad the student activist that inspired her didn't also shout something out about the deterioration of the planet because not once does she mention how industry impacts the earth, polluting it and using up natural resources and she was writing this in 2004, so no excuse.

The Bush Agenda

Covers much more than just the Bush agenda, going back to the first influence of the Neo-cons with the Carter doctrine drawn up by Paul Wolfowitz. Covers all the usual territory about PNAC (Plan for a New American Century) and how that group first expressed themselves by asking Clinton to go to war with Iraq. Much of this story I already knew; what was illuminating were the details and background on the four companies that are major war profiteers and supporters of Bush's global agenda, namely Halliburton, Chevron, Bechtel and Lockheed Martin. Except for Haliburton, the other three are based in Northern California making it a local story for me. I was particularly illuminated by the history of Bechtel and how George Schultz angled to overthrow US policies that would help his company gain business access to the whole world to build nuclear power plants, thus kicking off the global proliferation of nuclear arms.

My father worked for the defense industry (as an engineer) so reading about Lockheed Martin recalled the work he did and the eagerness with which he wanted us to go to the Persian Gulf war so he could field test the heads-up pilot's helmet for which he was able to patent some solution of his that was crucial to making it work. That I was a peace activist did amuse him so especially because he was so confident that war was inevitable.

The author lays out the history of the oil industry both in Northern California and Iraq. Know the history of oil and everything falls into place including who has power in American politics and why we support repressive regimes in the Middle East. She also gives a nice run down of the destructive policies of the World Bank and the "structural adjustment policies" of the IMF that have been the undoing of national economies world wide.

Most fascinating was the story of how the Bush agenda proceeded to erase all of Iraq's existing laws that they didn't like in order to dismantle the socialist infrastructure and force the country to favor the services of multi-national corporations. Changing a countries laws is illegal per the Geneva convention and why everything is such a mess, but no pundit is really going to discuss it in a big picture way because it means discussing how the socialistic government ran things much better for the populace while capitalism is all about looting multi-nationals. We do know bits and pieces like how the Bush agenda fired key workers who were running the country, but I don't remember anyone saying they were replaced with Haliburton and Bechtel scabs from Pakistan. They also fired the Iraqi soldiers and apparently let them go home fully armed. So here we have key people out of work supported by an armed contingent while their foreign replacements are making an expensive mess of the reconstruction, doing things the American way when all the existing fittings and hardware were from France or the Soviet Union. Who would support this nightmare?

I heard a speaker on Iraq talk about how the Iraqis have a saying about the American reconstruction. "To heal the wound you must first pull out the knife."

And despite this story being called the Bush Agenda, it is not a new one. Under Clinton, the economy of Yugoslavia was similarly invaded for the purpose of replacing nationally controlled infrastructure with private enterprise. But she doesn't mention that. I read it in To Kill A Nation. What is new is the extent to which the Bush administration has taken this strategy especially by forcing the signing of "free trade" policies that would make the WTO cream its pants, not only with Iraq but with other middle eastern countries thus forming MEFTA.

It becomes clear through the details, Antonia Juhasz gives, that this is not a war, but a military takeover by American corporations. Particularly telling were the provisions put into place to rewrite Iraqi textbooks. Gives new meaning to the phrase "history is written by the victors". Reading this book convinced me that we should not even say the words "war in Iraq" because that is essentially a euphemism implying that we are defending ourselves from aggressive violent outsiders while protecting innocents. From now on I'm going to call it the American occupation of Iraq, make that the illegal American occupation of Iraq.

This is one of the few non-fiction books I've read whose author is a woman. I'm glad to see that a woman will tackle economics as a world organizing principle. I was beginning to fear that, while women excelled in discussing psychology and social justice, they were resistant when it comes to the importance of economic health. The last woman I read who tackled this territory was Frances Moore Lappe of "Food For A Small Planet" fame. Her book Food First was my first glimpse into the continuation of colonialism through corporate globalizatio

The World Is Flat

Reads like an Evangelical preacher explaining, to the already converted, how we will have heaven on Earth if everyone on the planet would just embrace Capitalism and repent from the evil ways of Communism, Marxism and terrorism.

NY Times columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner, Freidman, is well known, which is why so many people were reading this pap and mentioning it to me until I felt I had to suffer through it in order to respond intelligently. The first third of the book is about how the internet brought us globalized trade, thus "flattening" the world. All old news if you've kept up with technology or lost money in the dot.com debacle. Some interesting anecdotes of how India ramped up their call centers in Bangalore, that explains a lot about India's current stake in the world's economy, as well as China's, but it's really about Dell Computer's stake in the world and McDonalds.

All his details are a good example of how invested we are in increased complexity, vastly long supply lines, and an exponentially expanding power grid. He does not mention anything about how vulnerable these features make the whole world (except in the event of terrorism).

In the second third of the book he gives his readers a stern talking to about how Americans have to get back to discipline and hard work and figure this whole flat world thing out, in order to keep up with the much cheaper and better educated worker in India who so happily man (and woman) those call centers. At which point I suspect most will put the book down.

Near the end, he becomes so stunningly ill conceived, as to be rendered dangerous, if anyone bothers to read to the end of this tome. He has the audacity to suggest that Capitalism is the ultimate tool of peace because every country that has a McDonald's in it is far less likely to make war on its neighbors (because supply lines have become so important). He does not mention that every country that has a McDonald's in it is far less likely to be bombed by the US, back into the Stone Age, because it has not yet been colonized by corporate interests and needs to be humbled so it can be.

He explains the events of 9/11 as a cautionary tale about how the flattening of the world makes us vulnerable to the suicide bombers of the world (all 200 of them since 9/11) while making no mention of the impact of our sanctified, military terrorism, apart from some references to Bush and Co having behaved badly.

He does attempt to fend off critics of capitalism by offering to tweak the system with his suggestions for a more "compassionate" capitalism. His appeal to industry to take the compassionate route is about as effective a call to arms as a preacher's plea to his flock to abstain from sex (and for himself to abstain from buggering the choir).

His understanding of the world is so simplistic, he reminds me of our Teflon president, Reagan. I can just see him browsing a bookstore and saying to himself, "I don't need to read that, it's written by a Blah, Blah", whenever he comes upon anything that might challenge his viewpoint. I gather that most of the nation sees the world the way he presents it and conduct themselves in a similar fashion.

Planet of Slums

Nobody should have any delusions about the global economy raising all boats, after reading this. Fascinating details, thoroughly researched and footnoted. Has a Dante's Inferno quality to it as the author describes the conditions and peels back the myths about the poor and the neo-liberal free market solutions that have been bestowed on them.

This thesis exposes the fallout of the International Monetary Fund policies as it works its way through each third world country for the benefit of those fleecing the world for every last penny. Though I already knew about IMF policies wreaking havoc on local economies, agriculture and the environment, I had no idea that exploiting the poor could be so profitable, but because there are so increasingly many of them congregating in such concentrated areas, they are a large market for all the things that the IMF forced the host country to take away ie, housing, food, power and water.

One of the slums mentioned a number of times is Klong Toey which is within walking distance of my house in Bangkok. I never ventured into it, only drove past.

His parenthetical references to his sources breaks up the narrative a bit and he assumes that one should know where all these cities are. Quick where is Kinshassa, Dakar and Port-au-Prince? Being a British publication, the author may have assumed a higher level of education of his reader, but I appreciated the global sweep of his coverage.

The final analysis by the Pentagon is as revealing as their report on Global Warming was. Something here for everyone whether you fear economic collapse, terrorism or bird flu. A much needed perspective for anyone wanting to fathom solutions for planetary problems. Luckily he is working on another book about how the poor are resisting. After all, after the Inferno comes Purgatory. Would be nice to have a Paradisio too.