Recommended reading: Two articles on the US economy and one on the myth of free trade

What is happening to the U.S. economy? Why are the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, dominated by the US, preaching "free markets" and "free trade," which are myths? Here are three recently published articles, all interesting, and, in my opinion, related.

1. Richard Heinberg’s "Peak Everything Economics, or, What Do You Call This Mess?" Heinberg, according to his bio, is “[O]ne of the world's foremost Peak Oil (oil depletion) educators and is a Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute. He is the author of eight books including The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World and The Oil Depletion Protocol - A Plan To Avoid Oil Wars, Terrorism, and Economic Collapse.

2. Chalmers Johnson’s "The Myth of Free Trade." The American Empire Project (cofounded by my favorite blogger, Tom Englehardt), describes Johnson: “[P]resident of the Japan Policy Research Institute, a non-profit research and public affairs organization devoted to public education concerning Japan and international relations in the Pacific. He taught for thirty years, 1962-1992, at the Berkeley and San Diego campuses of the University of California and held endowed chairs in Asian politics at both of them. At Berkeley he served as chairman of the Center for Chinese Studies and as chairman of the Department of Political Science. His B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in economics and political science are all from the University of California, Berkeley.”

Johnson’s most recent books, a trilogy: Blowback: The Costs and Consequences of American Empire, The Sorrows of Empire - Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic and Nemesis - The Last Days of the American Republic.

3. Scott Horton’s post at Harper's, "How Bush's Fiscal Mismanagement Produced a Recession," commenting on and linking to the excellent study, "Is the 2007 U.S. Sub-Prime Financial Crisis So Different? An International Historical Comparison. This evening, I'm tackling this study, a 12 page draft published on January 14, 2008.

(cartoon: Who Crashed the Economy?)

Juan Cole's recommended reading for Thursday

Three recommendations at Juan Cole’s Informed Comment.

Engelhardt’s post is a must-read, and Rubin’s is fascinating for those of us who have been involved in election integrity in this country. I’m also baffled by Pelosi’s position on impeachment.

1. The Justice Department is going to investigate the destruction of videotapes of the interrogation of prisoners in US custody that showed torture. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi keeps asking what Bush has done that is impeachable. Shredding the constitution should count, and if that doesn't then this should.

2. Tom Engelhardt on how Bush took us to the dark side, i.e. how he tempted us into torture.

3. Barnett Rubin on vote rigging in Pakistan. A fascinating dialogue is emerging on some of these issues between him and his colleagues that is a testimony to the interactive character of writing on the Web.

(photo of Cole from his blog)

Rebecca Solnit: The Hope Helper

In the past couple of weeks, several of my political allies started feeling hopeless about making a difference. In my efforts to cheer them up, I tell them about Rebecca Solnit, author of Hope in the Dark - Untold Histories, Wild Possiblities, which I read several years ago. It has helped sustain me when the news is consistently grim.

Rebecca was discovered by my favorite blogger, Tom Engelhardt, who has been posting at TomDispatch since shortly after 9/11. He edited Hope in the Dark, and he offers Rebecca the TomDispatch platform for an occasional article.

A sensible blogger, Tom is checking out until after the holidays, but he left us a great gift, "Rebecca Solnit on Hope in Print.” Rebecca shares her “secret library of hope,” 12 books “that offer the reader encouragement not to curl up in despair when faced with a grim world.”

Of the twelve books Rebecca recommends, I’m singling out Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains - Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (also edited by Tom) because it has sustained me this past year in my efforts to promote impeachment, considered by many as a hopeless endeavor. I previously posted about it here.
I’ll be away for several days, traveling with my family. My gift to you is to point you in Rebecca Solnit’s direction. She’s the ultimate hope helper.

(Bury the Chains book cover: Quakers in Britain)

Recommended reading - Legacy of Ashes

On July 26, 2007, the 60th anniversary of the creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) I briefly posted about it and linked to an excellent review of Legacy of Ashes - The History of the CIA, by Tim Weiner (photo) a reporter for The New York Times and Pulitzer Price winner for his work on secret national security programs.
The review, posted on July 24th at TomDispatch.com (my favorite blogger), is by Chalmers Johnson, (one of my favorite authors) who was an outside consultant for the CIA from 1967 to 1973.

I read the review. I bought the book. It’s a page-turner.

Here’s an item that interested me: On page 60, Weiner describes an ill-fated mission (as virtually all covert CIA missions were), which dropped a four-man Chinese guerrilla team into Manchuria in 1952. They were captured and four months later radioed for help. Two young CIA officers and a pilot were sent to rescue them. The plane was shot down, the pilot killed, and the officers, Dick Fecteau and Jack Downey spent 19 and 20 years, respectively, in prison in China. “Beijing later broadcast a scorecard for Manchuria: the CIA dropped 212 foreign agents in; 101 were killed and 111 were captured.” This was typical of the CIA’s covert operations in the first few years.

I Googled “Dick Fecteau,” and came up with a report on him at the Prisoners of War Network, also interesting reading.

I urge you to read Johnson’s review. I’m convinced that if you do, you, too, will want to read Legacy of Ashes

(photo of book: Random House; photo of Weiner – The New York Times)

I'm off for a two week road trip: suggested reading while I'm away

Earlier today I posted a book review of IT CAN HAPPEN HERE, by Joe Conason. Before I leave for a two-week road trip, I want to make sure you have plenty to read while I’m away. Just in case you’ve already read Conason’s most recent book or are a fast reader, please read on.

I can’t think of a better place to send you than the American Empire Project, which has been developed by Tom Engelhardt (TomDispatch.com) and Steve Fraser, two editors with long and distinguished careers in publishing.

It’s obvious I’m a Tom Engelhardt fan, having posted about him on February 2nd. He’s my favorite blogger, has written three books and has edited well over 250. My lifetime goal is to read all of them.

If you’re not quite ready to join me in my ambitious project of reading everything Tom has written and edited, start small by going to the American Empire Project booklist. That ought to keep you busy for the next couple of weeks.

And with that, I bid you adieu:

Sixty years ago today the CIA was created - has it fulfilled its mission?

This morning, I noted “Today’s Highlights in History” in the New York Times: On July 26, 1947, President Truman signed the National Security Act, creating the Department of Defense, the National Security Council, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

If you want to know if the CIA has fulfilled the mission for which it was created, check out Tom Engelhardt’s dispatch posted yesterday, Chalmers Johnson, Agency of Rogues, in which Johnson reviews Tom Weiner’s excellent book, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA.

(CIA logo - Grunch.net)

ON THIS DAY TWO HUNDRED AND TWENTY YEARS AGO

Each morning I check “On This Day,” the last item that shows up in the New York Times online. Here’s this morning’s: “On May 22, 1947, the Truman Doctrine was enacted as Congress appropriated military and economic aid for Greece and Turkey.”

However, on May 22, 1787, something much more momentous occurred. Twelve men met in a printing shop at 2 George Yard in London. According to Alexis de Tocqueville, (1805-1859) a keen observer of civil society in the 19th century, what this meeting launched was “absolutely without precedent…If you pore over the histories of all peoples, I doubt you will find anything more extraordinary.”

How these twelve men struggled and succeeded in launching the monumental effort to abolish Britain’s slave trade is the subject of Adam Hochschild’s Bury the Chains.

In the Introduction, Hochschild reminds us, “At the end of the eighteenth century well over three quarters of all people alive were in bondage of …. slavery or serfdom….Looking back today, what is even more astonishing than the pervasiveness of slavery in the late 1700s is how swiftly it died….The antislavery movement had achieved its goal in little more than one lifetime.”

Hochschild adds, “…it was the first time a large number of people became outraged, and stayed outraged for many years, over someone else’s rights.”

How did the abolitionists succeed? “…because they mastered one challenge that still faces anyone who cares about social and economic justice: drawing connections between the near and the distant…the abolitionists first job was to make Britons understand what lay behind the sugar they ate, the tobacco they smoked, the coffee they drank.”

Not only are we indebted to this small band of citizens who first met on this day two hundred and twenty years ago for spearheading the end of one of the worst of human injustices in the most powerful empire of its time, according to Hochschild, “…they also forged virtually every important tool used by citizens’ movements in democratic countries today.”

SIDEBAR: Bury the Chains was edited by Tom Englehardt, whom I admire tremendously and posted about on February 2, Tom Englehardt, Blogger, Author and Editor. Hochschild says of Tom, “No one was more essential to this book than the country’s best freelance editor.”

On January 21, Tom posted Mired in the Trenches of the Iraq Fiasco by Adam Hochschild.

"At the wrong place, at the wrong time"

Yesterday, as I drove home after spending 24 hours helping care for my ten week-old twin grandchildren, I listened to snippets of speeches from the convocation in memory of the students who were killed at Virginia Tech on Monday. What I remember most vividly is Bush saying that the victims were “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” This is so true. They were hapless victims of a random killer, and we mourn their deaths and injuries.

My problem is that we in this country don’t appear to mourn the deaths of others across the world “in the wrong place at the wrong time ” like the Iraqi child in the photo.

I’m not alone. My favorite bloggers, Juan Cole of Informed Comment and Tom Engelhardt of TomDispatch.com feel the same way.

Yesterday Juan wrote Iraq has two Virginia Techs every day: “The profound sorrow and alarm produced in the American public by the horrific shootings at Virginia Tech should give us a baseline for what the Iraqis are actually living through. They have two Virginia Tech-style attacks every single day. …[by] next Tuesday I will…report to you that 64 Iraqis have been killed in political violence. And those will mainly be the ones killed by bombs and mortars. They are only 13% of the total; most Iraqis killed violently, perhaps 500 a day throughout the country if you count criminal and tribal violence, are just shot down. Shot down, like the college students and professors at Blacksburg. We Americans can so easily, with a shudder, imagine the college student trying to barricade himself behind a door against the armed madman without. But can we put ourselves in the place of Iraqi students?"

In his post yesterday, Juan linked to what he wrote On February 26: “A suicide bomber with a bomb belt got into the lobby of the School of Administration and Economy of Mustansiriya University in Baghdad and managed to set it off despite being spotted at the last minute by university security guards. The blast killed 41 and wounded a similar number according to late reports, with body parts everywhere and big pools of blood in the foyer as students were shredded by the high explosives.”

My question: How many of us paid attention to this “incident,” so similar to what happened at Virginia Tech?

In Tom Engelhardt’s excellent post, Words to Die For, published the same day as the Virginia killings, he states: “…. this Monday -- the "early" tallies showed 6 GIs and 69 Iraqis killed and 39 wounded (and we're only talking about immediately reported bodies here); while on the previous day, 5 GIs, 2 Britons, and 109 Iraqis died (with 173 were wounded), and on the day before that, 164 Iraqis were killed, 345 injured, and 26 kidnapped. In terms only of the recorded dead of those three "normal" days of "stability and security" under the President's "surge" plan, we're talking, in terms of the dead, about the equivalent of more than 12 Virginia-Tech-style massacres.”

This evening, as I checked the online news, I read an Associated Press story, Four bombs kill at least 178 in Baghdad, …”the deadliest day in the city since the start of the U.S.-Iraqi campaign to pacify the capital two months ago.

In the deadliest of the attacks, a parked car bomb detonated in a crowd of workers at the Sadriyah market in central Baghdad, killing at least 122 people and wounding 148, said Raad Muhsin, an official at Al-Kindi Hospital where the victims were taken.”

Certainly those who were killed in Baghdad were also “in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

How does the world view the Virginia killings? According to this morning’s Washington Post article, Va. Killings Widely Seen as Reflecting a Violent Society, “Officials, newspaper columnists and citizens around the world Tuesday described the Virginia Tech massacre as the tragic reflection of an America that fosters violence at home and abroad, even as it attempts to dictate behavior to the rest of the world.”

It’s time to take stock of who we are and what we believe about the value of all human lives.